Movie Review: 'Carrie'

There’s little to say about the third adaptation of Stephen King’s 1974 book -- Carrie is a letdown on pretty much every level of filmmaking.

Carrie
U/A: Horror
Dir: Kimberley Pierce
Cast: Chloe Moretz, Julianne Moore
*½

There’s little to say about the third adaptation of Stephen King’s 1974 book -- Carrie is a letdown on pretty much every level of filmmaking.

Chloe Moretz in 'Carrie'

No matter how much it tries to distance itself from Brian De Palma’s 1976 classic, it keeps borrowing elements and reminding us how good that film was and how unmemorable this one is.

Kimberley Pierce, the director of the excellent Boys Don’t Cry and the fairly good Stop Loss, seems to have been hugely uncomfortable while making this horror movie. She casts the talented Chloe Grace Moretz in the role that Sissy Spacek became popular for, and wastes an opportunity to cover any new ground on the story. If it weren’t for the new locales, Carrie would have been a shot-by-shot remake of the original, much like Gus Van Sant’s ‘colour’ remake of Psycho.

As with the previous installment, the film follows high school misfit Carrie (Moretz) who unleashes wrath on her classmates when she gets embarrassed at the prom. That is the entire story of the film, and the movie wastes a good hour-and-a-half to get to this point, as if preparing us for something new and interesting. There’s Julianne Moore, who keeps popping in and out as Carrie’s dysfunctional mother, but nothing remotely intriguing occurs on the long, tedious way to the finale. Frustratingly, the finale too is muted and the film isn’t the least bit frightening, despite being presented as a horror movie.

It could be studio interference or just lazy filmmaking that did the movie in, but as it stands the film is quite unwatchable for fans of the original and too tame for those coming in fresh. The Evil dead remake from last year worked because it did something fresh with its protagonist and had Carrie followed the same formula, it could at least have been an ‘edgier’ movie. Moretz and Moore are very good actors, they deserve better material than this and hopefully we’ll see them in a better film sometime in the future.

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