The Rage: Carrie 2

The Rage: Carrie 2 features a very nice performance from the lead Emily Bergyl and unlike most movies in the teen dice and slice genre, Carrie 2 manufactures a bit of space, some wistfulness around the characters.

For heaven's sake Billie Holiday even makes it prominently onto the soundtrack!

Many reviewers seem to have found the pace of Carrie 2 two slow, but they mustn't be fans of Billie Holiday. This is a horror movie for the (very slightly) more thoughtful viewer.

The original Carrie is a classic, said by many to be Brian de Palma's best film. It earned a couple of Academy Award nominations, for Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, and had monumentally effective pivotal scenes.

It created a genre of its own. Viewers who haven't seen Carrie will need little prompting to understand what is going on in this openly derivative sequel. And they won't have to be told what is going to happen. Carrie 2 makes no attempt to break new ground and Carrie One invented the rules.

A young girl (Sissy Spacek) is the dowdy one at school in the 1967 movie. Her school mates taunt her and horribly humiliate her at the prom, but little do they know that Carrie White is powerfully telekinetic. She slams the doors shut and massacres them.

De Palma and Spacek gave young Carrie a great deal of dignity and the audience understood the pain within this young person when she took her terrible revenge. That De Palma managed to promote strong reactions more often by the use of subtle hints, rather than the blood covered bludgeon favoured by less able directors, was a testament to his superb directing skills.

And it is late in the Carrie 2, when the massacre scene begins and the blood begins to flow, that the magic is lost. This is the nineties, and I suppose that the kids won't go unless there's excessive violence, but the movie would have worked far better if the murders could have been less noisy perhaps, or if Rachel had even let them go.

I loved the growing tattoo though and eventually had the biggest jump from fright for ages. Long live horror films!