arrie White is a shy, withdrawn high school outcast who lives alone with Margaret, her abusive religious nut of mother. She has been so sheltered from the world that when she experiences her first menstrual flow in the gym shower, she thinks she's bleeding to death. The other girls abuse her mercilessly, an act which helps to activate her powerful telekinetic powers.
Susan Snell was one of the girls who laughed at Carrie. But unlike her friends, she's capable of feeling bad about what she's done, and she decides to make amends by asking her boyfriend, Tommy, to go to the prom as Carrie's date.
The combination of this attention from an attractive boy and her own increasing psychic powers, gives Carrie the self-confidence she needs to defy her abusive Mom by going to the prom. A stunning makeover and the first happiness she's ever known affect Carrie in all the right ways: before everybody's eyes, she actually starts to blossom.
Unknown to Carrie, Susan, Tommy or most of the prom's other attendees, another student with a grudge against Carrie plans a grisly prank designed to humiliate Carrie before the entire school. Shattered, the shy and gentle girl is about to snap, unleashing a power terrible enough to destroy them all.
Effective but unnecessary update
Despite its supernatural elements, both the novel and prior movie versions of Carrie derive most of their power from their firm position as tragedies of character. They present the emotionally wrenching tale of a social outcast who is allowed a brief glimpse of the popularity she has always been denied, who seems to blossom with the realization that a happier life might be possible, and who then suffers a monstrous prank that utterly destroys her. The fact that this outcast happens to be a telekinetic with terrifying destructive power, whose rage erupts after her humiliation at the high school prom, is merely the climax: The horror comes before it. It's as bleak a tale as Stephen King ever wrote, in a career that went on to include some awfully bleak ones.
The first question that comes to mind when considering this remake is—why? The 1976 film, starring Sissy Spacek and directed by Brian DePalma, did this story about as well as it could be done. Scene-by-scene remakes, as this (initially) seems to be, run the risk of being only exercises in redundancy, updated only by occasional present-day references like Freddie Prinze Jr. and the Internet.
That said, the remake works for most of its length. Angela Bettis, as the put-upon Carrie, gives a strong and nuanced performance, which takes her from the aching vulnerability of the early scenes to the shell-shocked rage of her rampage at the prom. It's a portrayal that compares very favorably with Spacek's, which is high praise indeed. Rena Sofer, David Keith and Patricia Clarkson also deliver fine work. It's hard to comment quite as knowledgeably on the special effects, since the preview tape I saw was incomplete, with several of those sequences unfinished or missing, but as far as I could see, the high-school apocalypse is carried off quite well. These strengths account for the film's grade being as high as it is.
It might have been even higher were it not for the stunning misstep that arrives in the last few minutes, and which begins with Carrie's final confrontation with her religious-nut mother. Everything that happens from this point falls into the "what-were-they-thinking?" category, missing the whole point of the Stephen King story and erasing much of the tale's emotional resonance. Stop watching when Carrie makes it home after the prom, and you'll respect the film a lot more.
