Hooptober Neun (2022) - Film #12
1 Stephen King adaptation that is not the first go around

The instance the title showed up, I was worried. You can tell a lot from a font, and what this font told me was not good. It certainly wasn’t helped by what I assume were poorly animated meteorites flying down the screen. Sure enough, the meteorites show up again later, looking even worse than they did in the introduction.

So, this is a made for TV version of Carrie, and that made for TV aesthetic seeps out of every pore, from the strange grading to the overwrought acting to the stock soundtrack choices to the concluding line that precedes the fade to black. A made for TV movie allows nonsense to masquerade as deep, insightful thought. A made for TV movie allows Michaelangelo’s Last Supper to be compared to Dogs Playing Poker as some sort of commentary on religion. The film is partially framed by a police interview process, and there are an awful lot of dialogue howlers in these scenes. My understanding is that there is a lot of dialogue in the movie that matches the dialogue from the de Palma version. It would make sense then that these added in police scenes were where it went wrong.

As is the rule with made for TV movies, every acting choice and character element needs to be shoved right in the audience’s face. Carrie is bullied - but the bullying is unbelievably over-the-top. The bullies stuff Carrie’s locker with tampons. But not like, a box of tampons. Hundreds upon hundreds of tampons. How did they afford them? How did they manage to stack them in there and close the door? Early in the film, the principal gets Carrie’s name wrong. Now given the delivery here, you’d think he was doing it on purpose, and that the point was that he was malicious, rather than that Carrie was simply unknown to people in the school. This is confusing considering slightly later in the film there is a scene where the principal goes to bat for Carrie and her teachers in a big way, and shows himself to actually be a pretty great guy. Billy, on the other hand, is not a great guy, but he just sort of flies out of nowhere and I spent a good portion of his screen time thoroughly confused by his new prominence and his absolutely unshakeable creepiness.

Are there positives here? Of course. Part of making a remake of a successful story is that you already know that the story at least has some merit. The way that the story addresses religious beliefs and the way in which these beliefs can leave someone ill-prepared to deal with the world is interesting.

I won’t pick out particular performances, but in general the acting among those playing students is less than convincing. Angela Bettis, however, puts in an engaging performance, and watching her Carrie start to navigate the world around her is actually quite touching, almost like some bizarro world ET.

All of the issues with this movie are compounded by the fact that it’s a decent chunk over two hours long. You have to wonder why it took David Carson an extra thirty minutes to tell the same story that de Palma told in 98 minutes in 1976.

The biggest problem here though? I found myself getting caught up in the ridiculous goings-on at times. Only at times though, and usually when scenes were centred around Bettis. Ultimately though, there are too many issues here to make this enjoyable enough to surpass a two star rating. I just hope the 2013 version has a better title font.