![\"\"](\"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/carrie-poster-fullbloodybody-full-202x300.jpg\" "\\"carrie-poster-fullbloodybody-full\\"")
<\/p>\nBy Bob Garver<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cCarrie\u201d tells the story of a teenager who goes on a killing spree at her school. Since we see her get bullied, we\u2019re supposed to feel sympathy for her. The film seems to have an attitude that even though she does a bad thing, that doesn\u2019t make her a bad person. I say that anyone who murders classmates in cold blood is a bad person.<\/p>\n
The film is of course a remake of the 1976 film starring Sissy Spacek, itself adapted from a novel by Stephen King. Chloe Grace Moretz plays Carrie White, and while her acting skills are certainly up to snuff, it probably wasn\u2019t the best decision to cast such an established starlet in the role. She epitomizes the often-mocked clich\u00e9 of the undesirable outcast who just has to fix up her hair and makeup and she looks beautiful.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 Carrie\u2019s mother Margaret is played by Julianne Moore, and boy does she make me miss Piper Laurie from the 1976 version. She\u2019s a religious zealot, the religion being a brand of Christianity pretty much invented by her. She tortures Carrie with these beliefs and Julianne Moore tortures us with her acting. The character is written so over-the-top that the scariest way to play her is straight. But along comes that scenery-gnasher Moore, who adds so many embellishments that she manages to be the least believable thing in a movie about a girl with telekinesis.<\/p>\n
Carrie is harassed at home and at school, where she\u2019s humiliated during an incident in the girls\u2019 locker room. The gym teacher (Judy Greer, one of my favorite actresses who nevertheless has no chance of making sense of this character) punishes the girls who bullied her, but at no point does she encourage them to reach out to her and maybe not bully her for the right reasons. The girls just want to get back at Carrie even worse, especially Chris (Portia Doubleday) who defies the punishment and gets banned from prom as a result. Sue (Gabriella Wilde) feels sorry for Carrie, so sorry that she convinces her boyfriend Tommy (Ansel Egort) to invite the ugly duckling to prom.<\/p>\n
Carrie is at once scared, overjoyed, and several different types of confused. She knows it\u2019s probably a trick to set up further humiliation, but she hopes against hope that it isn\u2019t. She doesn\u2019t know what to do around a boy, or even other girls for that matter. Her mom promises to interfere even before she verbally promises to interfere, but a little help from some newfound telekinetic abilities can take care of that. She goes to prom knowing that it\u2019s her social Do or Die time. As it turns out, it\u2019s more of a Do, Die, or Kill time.<\/p>\n
The film is billed as a horror movie, but the last quarter of the movie isn\u2019t really scary, just violent. Your monsters are Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore and realistically, how scary can they be? The only time the climactic sequences approach terror is when someone gets ahold of something sharp that is scary in and of itself. And even then their edge is taken away by dicey special effects. Plus they\u2019re further dulled by choppy editing. My apologies for not working \u201ccleave\u201d in there somewhere.<\/p>\n
Poor quality aside, it\u2019s the very idea of the killing scenes that I find most offensive. The minute Carrie starts harming people who mean no harm to her, she loses all sympathy from me. Real-life killers often have a history of abuse, but do we relish in their revenge, especially if they aren\u2019t targeting the individuals who abused them? No, we think that it\u2019s a shame they were abused, but that doesn\u2019t make them any less horrible people. At the end of the film, it\u2019s supposedly the ignorant people who still think of Carrie as a freak. I know Carrie\u2019s story, I\u2019ve considered the evidence, and I\u2019ve decided she\u2019s a freak.<\/p>\n
One Star out of Five.<\/p>\n
\u201cCarrie\u201d is playing at Hershey Cocoaplex. Call 312-1300 for showtimes and other info. The film is rated R for bloody violence, disturbing images, language and some sexual content. Its running time is 100 minutes.<\/p>\n