Saturday at the Movies -- Carrie & Insidious: Chapter 2

You will know her name.

Or so the movie poster tells us. Well, truth be told, I don’t think, Carrie, the film itself will be remembered after Halloween season, although I think Chloë Grace Moretz is just fine in the role that made Sissy Spacek a household horror name. Moretz nails the awkward discomfort of a “misfit” raised by a religious fanatic (while I think Julianne Moore can be quite horrifying, to me she’s just a bit too beautiful for a role that Piper Laurie made delightfully grotesque in the original film) and seems alienated from the other students in school. Portia Doubleday is the bullying monster that gets what’s coming to her. The scene with the period in the girls’ showers has always made me look away from the screen in total discomfort. Throwing tampons at her and Portia recording it on her phone while heckling Carrie had me closing my eyes; look, can’t stand a girl getting mocked and destroyed by a bunch of bitches, so sue me. Anyway, this film did do something I appreciated: Carrie allows a gym teacher (played by character actress Judy Greer) that was her moral support and a real vocal advocate for her being treated appropriately to live when she massacres a lot of people at the prom. I liked that Gabriella Wilde’s hot homecoming queen felt genuinely ashamed for her involvement in Carrie’s shower room belittling, convincing her lacrosse stud, Billy (Alex Russell) to take the poor girl to the prom. That she would also be spared the fury of Carrie was another plus. Most of the others in the wave of Carrie’s wrath aren’t so lucky. Basically the film goes where I expected, with the CGI age allowing us to see Carrie levitate objects (like books on telekinesis, sharp instruments like scissors, knives, even a ruler, her bed, and eventually Mama) and hurl people across rooms. I’ll say this, when Moretz twists that face (she cocks her head to the side a bit and has this routine with her hands like a magician about to perform a trick…except the trick is destroying somebody by sheer will and telekinetic force) and those enraged eyes (and expression) look at her soon-to-be victims I was convinced that I’m fortunate to be sitting in a theater and not caught in her fixed gaze. The trick with the car (lifted off a street after its asphalt has earthquake like crack created by Carrie to stop the vehicle from leaving her presence) where a face goes through a windshield in slow motion (after the driver’s face crushes into the steering wheel, complete with the bone in his nose snapping loudly) is probably the coolest CGI scene, and the face full of glass protruding forth as her last breaths dissipate seems to add a finality to all the rage that left a prom night in flames. There’s plenty of Moore (maybe too much) emphasizing her madness and inability to function without retreating to religious fanaticism (like banging her head against the wall, scratching her arms as they leave marks that never heal, or using a sewing needle to pierce her flesh when confronting ordinary folks who buy prop dresses from her shop in town) to cope with things that clash with her guarded belief system. I kind of had a hard time brushing aside that Moretz would be one of the popular kids in school if it weren’t for drab dresses and frizzled hair “uglying her” up (even there, she’s a bit too pretty to totally sell her character as a girl no one would want to be around). Kimberly Peirce milks the pig blood bath for emotional impact by showing the bucket above flood Carrie not once, not twice, but three times! Moretz covered in pig blood, looking down at a guy (hit in the head by the bucket that falls, killing him) she cares for, and becoming totally fed up with all that has happened to her; this does set up the wallop rather effectively.

 

Prior to seeing Insidious Chapter 2, we had some time to kill. About an hour or so. I was scanning the aisles at Walmart, and my eyes fixed (kind of like Carrie’s vengeful gaze towards those teens who really pissed her off) on the 35^th Anniversary Edition of Halloween (1978) on blu-ray. I just had to have it (no, I didn’t, but I digress…). I have avoided multiple editions that have come out (from Anchor Bay, a company that once ruled and thanks to Starz, now sucks), but this one promises a new featurette and an audio commentary with Carpenter and Curtis (I loved the ones with Carpenter and the late producer Debra Hill, especially for how informative they are), plus the television version footage. It also has a booklet with a little talk about the film. So I was sold; persuaded a bit too easily was I.

 

To tell you the truth, I didn’t care for Insidious. Just a bit too incomprehensibly dark in parts that are supposed to be good and scary (but are just hard to see; hence, the lack of potency they should have is lost). The sequel to it (where Josh Lambert never actually returned from the “dark spiritual realm where certain spirits remain”; a psychopath with mommy issues, disguised as the “bride in black” where he committed a rash of serial killings, leaving the bodies under bed sheets in a hidden room behind a book shelf in the house where he was forced to dress as a girl and answer to Marilyn, has “taken Josh’s spot”) was shockingly fun to me. I really, actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Not scary, and has those clichéd “possession” scenes you come to expect (chasing after the Lambert family—in particular, Renai (Rose Byrne)—the killer spirit taking Josh’s body will perhaps destroy them all if the real father doesn’t make his way back, out of the trap that is the spiritual realm), but seeing Patrick Wilson wasting away, the paranormal investigators assisting Barbara Hershey (with a much more substantial role in the film) in putting an end to what haunts her family’s lives (including a trip to an old abandoned hospital she was once a nurse and the search through a suicide patient’s old cob-webbed home, with both these locations providing clues as to what holds the body of Josh under subjection), and clever use of Josh “on the outside looking in” (a 1986 video recording that has him as a faint image cleared up digitally on computer talking to his younger self and a piano tune that his wife knows was meant as a love token to him) do make up for a lot. I particularly found the development involving Parker Crane thanks to Elise’s (Line Shaye, marvelous scene-stealer she always is; Lindsay Seim does a bang-up impression of her!) boys, Specs (writer Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) and a former colleague, spiritualist Carl (Steve Coulter) working in concert with a motivated mother, Lorraine (Hershey) to solve the crisis tormenting the Lambert family. The discovery of the bodies in the house, with the toy rocking horses moving on their own upstairs, the chandelier falling after screws unloosen invisibly (nearly crushing Carl), Lorraine in her youth (played by House of the Devil’s Jocelin Donahue) remembering Parker in an elevator after taking a suicidal leap from his hospital room window, the discovery that the dice (Carl’s device to have the dead answer questions from him) used by supposedly the spirit of Elise turning out to be the “Mother of Death” leading the paranormal investigators on a wild goose chase, and the “lady in white” seen in the distance of Lorraine’s house prior to slapping Renai in the face all are little individual moments that added entertainment value to the experience. I really expected to leave underwhelmed, but was rather satisfied with the film overall, even if the trip through the foggy darkened spiritual realm with Josh, Carl, and Elise was a bit campy and the “overtaken father a possible threat to his innocent family” reeked of Amityville Horror. There was a dandy use of the “two tin cans connected by a string telephone” as a communication device between the Lambert son and “Marilyn” (in the closet), the opening (set in 1986) where a younger Elise meets Josh (and Lorraine)  for the first time as she approaches a closet which could house a malevolent spirit (with younger Josh, under hypnosis, leading her to it), and Dalton (Ty Simpkins) having a nightmare about a litany of spirits (looking old and haggard) coming at him (reminding me of the final scene with ghouls converging on Mervyn Johns); I was genuinely surprised there were as many moments that turn up in the film that entertained me.

Overall the day was fun. Carrie wasn’t a waste of time, even if it was forgettable, I picked up a new edition of a horror classic that has extra goodies I can’t wait to see, and a sequel that could have been a waste of time and money that left me with a smile on my face throughout. Can’t complain too much. Even if Carrie will take a decent gross and fade from memory soon after, the ending delivers the goods for those wanting to see her lay waste to bullies (and faculty).