Carrie

2013/ USA

Director: Kimberly Peirce

Starring: Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde, Portia Doubleday, Ansel Elgort

‘A Review’

The 2013 remake of the 1976 Brian De Palma film of the same name, entitled Carrie, is, in a word, terrible. Not only does it fail to recognise what genre it’s supposed to be in, the acting is dire. It feels like an amateur High School production. It does absolutely no justice to the original movie, or the Stephen King novel on which it is based.

The film begins with high hopes, an unusual birth, and we get a real sense of the evil power present. From there on it gets worse, and all in all it goes too fast. Example, it goes from the birth to High School in one scene. We see no story in-between and it leaves the audience wondering what the hell went on exactly in those missing years. What is worse is the highly clichéd American High School, it all just seems too fake, and so obviously an adult’s idea of what a High School is like.

Chlöe Grace Moretz, of Kick Ass fame, plays the demonic Satan child Carrie. It’s the typical story of the loner girl getting bullied by her more popular peers, until finally she snaps and uses her newly found telekinetic powers to kill everyone. It doesn’t help that her mother, played by Julianne Moore (Hannibal, The Big Lebowski), a bible wielding bible basher, psychologically torments her, and literally bashes her with a bible, one of the many unintentional humorous scenes.

It’s hard to find something good to say about this movie, except that it finally came to an end, as proved by the collective sigh of relief from the other moviegoers. It was boring and predictable, and the violence didn’t add anything to it. It wasn’t creative in anyway, and it felt like it was just there to shock the audience. One act of violence in particular made the whole of the audience flinch.

It felt to rushed, as if Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) spent all her time on the main effort, not giving the whole of the movie a chance to breathe eliminating the build up. The choice of casting was a strange one too, with Angel Elgort seemingly grunting his words out like a young Sylvester Stallone, in his first ever role.

Unfortunately the end points to sequel, something that should definitely not happen as I can’t really see where they would go with it. Maybe it will be a terrific surprise, but as we have seen countless times, the sequel is rarely as good as the first. In this case it couldn’t get any worse.

Do go see this film if you like mild horror that skims through a story, and contains mild violence. But I would recommend staying well away from it.

The only reason it gets two stars is the unintentional comedy that had the audience laughing in sympathy.

2/5

-Zak Gibson