The Rage: Carrie 2

Cast: Emily Bergl, Jason London, and Amy Irving

Director: Katt Shea

104 minutes (15) 1999

88 Films Blu-ray region B

[Released 8th April]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Steven Hampton

Katt Shea brings feminist credentials and enthusiastic genre credibility to directing this belated sequel, right from the movie’s first sequence. In a prologue, the young heroine’s wacky mother slaps red paint on the house’s walls and furniture, and even symbolically daubs bloody colour over her young daughter’s face, before she’s hauled away to funny-farm residency at Arkham. Consequently, Rachel (Emily Bergl), grows up in foster care. Later, at school, her best friend Lisa (Mena Suvari) at jumps off the roof, and this tragic suicide prompts a brief storm of telekinetic energies that is overlooked by all concerned, because of the resulting furore affecting many students and teaching staff. 

In this drama where thoughts can kill, Emily Bergl makes her screen debut, and she went on to appear in Spielberg’s UFOlogy TV mini-series Taken (2002). The Rage: Carrie 2 also features Amy Irving (from The Fury), playing the school’s guidance counsellor, Sue, lone survivor of the prom night blaze and massacre in the original Carrie (1976), but this movie has a different tone, because psychic Rachel is not so much an obvious victim of destructive forces beyond her control. The weirdo religious mania of obsessive parenting in Carrie is dropped here, largely in favour of exploring a schizoid mentality. This change of tone is particularly important because it places the movie in a sci-fi mode of ‘psychic thriller’, with markedly less emphasis upon (supernatural) horror, except for the graphic slaughter during climactic scenes.

Sensitive-seeming athlete Jesse (Jason London) appears wholly sympathetic to virgin Rachel’s anxiety, while lame-brained football jocks, led by stereotyped Eric, seduce underage school girls, and then dump them to score points in their predatory games that involve a likely prosecution for statutory rape. Blindly following social conventions, the friendships and betrayals of students generate highly emotive performances for juvenile hi-jinks, in collision-course plotting of deception and social exclusions fuelled by cat-house vanity, poisonous jealousy, and rampant hormones.

Rachel’s inner worldview is usually presented in B&W scenes, as clear evidence of the simplistic morality for teenage behaviours that is lacking any shades of complex meaning beyond pretence and dishonesty. In the end, it’s really no wonder that troubled Rachel’s over-reaction to all of the lies and fickleness, based on the selfish concerns of teen characters, eventually results in a psychic rage with an all-consuming bloodbath as the party-house burns down. The finale plays out like a comicbook sequence of anti-hero super-powers. Unlike the nervous Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), who seemed possessed by a terrible evil, Rachel acts from distinctly human vengeance, and her homicidal psychic assault is directed specifically at several cruel tormentors. Ultimately, she wields this telekinetic power, that is inherited and described like a mutant X-gene, instead of simply losing any control over it. 

Disc extras: include two commentary tracks, an alternative ending (with visual effects of a supernatural snake), and some deleted scenes.