Surprisingly inappropriate in a modern age

Rating: 3/10 (6 November 2013)

Only, three minutes in, I was shocked – I didn't remember the pervy, * literally * soft porn scene. High school girls run naked through a gym locker, soaping themselves and whipping each other with towels. Sissy Spacek rubs suds in between her legs as she starts her period.
Elevator music and Vaseline lens shots are turned on their head when she get " The Curse", and thinks she is dying because nobody told her about it. Enter a bunch of classmates including Amy Irving in her screen debut as Sue (later Mrs Spielberg) and Nancy Allen as Chris Hargensen, the school pin-up. None of whom are under 18. In fact, Spacek was 27 the year Carrie was made. Amy Irving was 24, and Nancy Allen, 26 (two years later, she was Mrs De Palma). Not really the 17 year-olds they are meant to be here. Thank God, after all that nudity and soaping.
And so we debate the poetry of " The Curse". Carrie is a gifted telekinetic – or is she cursed? The others smell her difference; like a pack of wolves on an injured deer, they taunt her as she wails in the still-running shower – saved at last by the pneumatic Miss Collins (Betty Buckley, also an ex of De Palma's). A woman barely older than the "girls", cast as their teacher. I let this one slide. But.
When we come to the ridiculous "detention" scene, the girls are berated by Miss Collins, and the viewer is subjected to several minutes of girls in tight shorts bouncing, bending and stretching. Another misogynist bit of movie making by De Palma. This scene is not only completely hammy, but is accompanied by terrible comedy music I can only describe as some weird organist beating off to Sesame Street. He employs the deep field, "split screen" effect here, probably egged on by cinematographer Mario Tosi and his Panavision Split Diopter Lense, which gives this look used in many horror and sci-fi movies such as The Andromeda Strain and The Boston Strangler. And – um, a Hitchcock look.
The issue in general here is there is no story left – Stephen King's original tale is so pared down by De Palma that the viewer is just waiting. Waiting for the big Prom scene at the end. Why this is, maybe, is that De Palma didn't mine that treasure chest of female angst deep enough – and unlike Stephen King who had wife Tabitha at his side filling him in on female psyche (He dedicated "Carrie" the novel to her: "This is for Tabby, who got me into it – and then bailed me out of it.") De Palma misses the mark without this personal input. Wide.
So The PROM. Frankly, I don't remember it being this lame. Carrie is kind of covered in blood with her big shot breaking out a fire hose and dousing everyone *to death* with water. Not really very scary. Somehow everything is aflame after a mic sparks and kills two male teachers we don't care about. She kills poor Miss Collins who did really nothing to deserve it, and actually comes across as the most ealistic actress here, with a board, cutting her in two.
De Palma, with Tosi, more or less trademarked split screen depth of focus for this type of horror action. He uses it many times in the film, both to highlight Carrie's utter alienation – or indeed the alienation of Miss Collins from her students.
But as much as he pioneers, he apes. Every time Carrie uses telekinesis, the Psycho shower violins creak up. The high school is called "Bates High School" instead of Ewen as in the Stephen King novel. It's a bit obvious, and not in a good way. And he uses the "multiple ending" as in Hitchcock's Topaz, "forming a kind of syllogism", says the book Hitchcock, Past And Future. Is the film over, or is there more? I jumped only once, a minute from the end – and many other horror movies have used these tropes to varying degrees of success – this is certainly an influence on the fantastic "Drag Me To Hell"'s end scene.
Despite this version of Carrie being thoroughly dumb and having script dialogue that reads like Murder, She Wrote or worse (at one point Amy Irving's mother says " Oh, I didn't hear you come in" despite them being seen clearly in the kitchen together for around three minutes immediately beforehand), there are reasons, albeit car-crash-viewing reasons, to check this version out – it does give origin to many horror clichés and it's entertaining to discover them first time around.
I can't bring myself to call it a classic, and you may feel you need to skip huge swathes of the film just to get to the prom scene, which you will probably find disappointing. I felt that the women in this film had been used to make De Palma's vision in a way that left a dry taste in my mouth: the nudity and sexual overtures are presented in a voyeuristic fashion that voids their value immediately.
I can't help thinking that in the hands of director Kimberly Peirce, known for her profound understanding of women in Boys Don't Cry will do a much deeper and broader job of the material, and with the sorts of technology used in 2013, surely she can do something more sinister with the prom scene than the humongously spraying penile extension of De Palma's fire hose... Cate Baum, FMR