The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999) Movie Review
Written By: MMR
Edited By: Grave Reviews Staff
Film Information
Director: Katt Shea
Producers: Paul Monash
Writers: Rafael Moreau
Date Released: March 12, 1999
Cast:
Emily Bergl as Rachel Lang
Jason London as Jesse Ryan
Dylan Bruno as Mark
J. Smith-Cameron as Barbara Lang
Amy Irving as Sue Snell
Rachel Blanchard as Monica
Charlotte Ayanna as Tracy
Rating = 1/5 Graves
***May contain some spoilers***
Synopsis
After the suicide of her closest friend, Rachel Lang, a quiet and booking unpopular girl, wanted to get back at those responsible for her friend’s death, the popular kids in school. While Rachel falls for Jesse Ryan, a popular football player, she stayed to her pursuit of going after the popular kids. Rachel then discovered she has powers, her vengeance intensified. Her actions echoed the same incident that happened years before.
Gore Factor
With the theme of vengeance, the death toll in the film is high and each picture of revenge meant that it is a bloodbath. Killing off with her telekinetic powers, Rachel has a killing spree after attending a party and feeling social pressure and teen angst when the video of her losing virginity was shown to all the attendees. Here is where the gore intensifies. People got killed by flying window glasses and CDs. As Rachel is telekinetic, everything is flying and on fire. A literal bloodbath, dead bodies pile up as they got burned or flown off by random objects or impaled. Fake blood was used for the dead people while dummies were used for the dead burning bodies. The film used a real fire and in one scene, a crewmember gets spotted putting chemicals to the dummies to expedite the spread of the fire.
The Grave Review
Overall, the film is a direct copy of the original Carrie, which is a masterpiece based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. Whilst being a direct copy, it has a poor execution of the original.
It follows the same arc as that of Carrie (1976) and has the exact same line up of events. It seems as if the writers took the original script, tweaked it into something more fitting for the ‘90s, changed the names of the character, added the story of Carrie as one from the history books, even used Sue Snell to be a part of the cast after surviving the incident at the prom years ago only to be killed of by a Carrie 2.0, and put a twist to it that Carrie and Rachel are half-sisters. What an unfortunate lineage, eh? It is as if you already know the story, it just has different characters set in a different timeline.
The special effects aren’t executed well, too. There are scenes where one can literally see the sticks or strings to make the objects move as if Rachel isn’t doing it with her mind. An example of this is when young Rachel threw a fit after social services took her mother into a psychiatric hospital, a door that closed literally had a stick to pull to make it close. Another is that crewmen can be seen in various scenes such as that in the fire montage.
And what is with the black and white scenes? The cinematography of the film included scenes in black and white trying to put a flavor in the film but some scenes put into monochrome don’t even make sense.
The only good out of the film is that it shows what ‘90s high school really looks like: full of jocks on one side, cheerleaders on the other, a bunch of guys trying to get a count on who they bang and how many, and unpopular kids bullied. It’s as legit as it can be.
With this, Grave Reviews gives he Rage: Carrie 2 (1999) one grave out of five graves.
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