CARRIE (2013)

I saw CARRIE the other day! I LOVE Halloween, and what better to start off this scary season with a scary movie. Now I'm a big fan of classic horror and there are few movies that are as iconic as the story of Carrie, a fragile young girl who acquires telekinetic powers amid being bullied by her classmates and abused by her psychotic mother. The original movie was made in the 1970s and although really dated by today's standards, it did two things really well, it really took its time in establishing how pathetic and damaged Carrie was as a character and at the climax of the film, Carrie's revenge is shocking and brutal in context to the rest of the film. The movie is so good that saying remaking it would be a Herculean task is an understatement. After all, they've tried to recapture the horror that was the original Carrie two other times before this with 1999's The Rage: Carrie 2, which was just dripping with 90's cliches and 2002's made for tv movie Carrie which has a great actress portraying the title role but literally nothing else. That being said I seriously had doubts about how modern Hollywood was going to do with the remake.

Ladies and Gentlemen... its awful. Its just flat out BAAAAAAD! This go round the title role is played by Chloe Grace Moretz. of Kick-Ass fame and though she tries it is quite apparent that she is not only far too pretty to be Carrie, shes a far cry from the skinny almost alien like Sissy Spacek in the 1976 film or the overweight and pimpled Carrie as described in Stephen King's original book. At times shes so self confident that you begin to think that if this girl had a health class and a school change she might just be alright. On top of that, the film makers CAN'T WAIT to let you know that Carrie has telekinetic powers. We're seriously not 5 minutes into the movie before we're shown that Carrie has this ability so by the end its not a shock that she uses her powers to cause the level of destruction she does. Speaking of which, Carrie's revenge at the end of the film, though way more violent than in the first film, it is WAY less scary. While the original Carrie was portrayed as a completely broken psychotic, Moretz's Carrie comes off as being only marginally upset with X-Man like mutant powers which needless to say totally killed the vibe. I still haven't mentioned any of the hamfisted "look at us we're the cool kids" montages or the totally hack acting doing by damn near everyone in the movie or the just BAAAAARELY passable CGI in here. The only shining stars this movie has, in my opinion, is the fact that Julianne Moore plays Carrie's mother. She really gets the role right and plays a hopelessly insane religious fanatic to a horrifying T. I only wish the rest of the movie could have been better, because Carrie is a film that does need a GOOD remake unfortunately this, isn't it. Carrie gets a 2...out of 5.