Robin Goodfellow:
As one might already know from my previous rantings on the subject, I really don’t like Stephen King. Never have. Likely never will. He writes for the lowest common denominator and above all I find his work to be boring, long winded and pretentious. A lot of people love the absolute shit out of it and hey whatever – different strokes. I like some pretty questionable fiction, so I’m not gonna judge. However, with boring pretentious books comes boring and pretentious movie material. No surprises here, but I’m not really a fan of the films based on his work, aside from Pet Sematary and I really only like that one because that little kid gets blown away by an eighteen wheeler and Judd Crandall played by Herman Munster is perfect.. Also that cat was named Winston Churchill.. I wonder if they fed it whiskey and cognac and if it made impassioned speeches. Stephen King was a crazy cokehead.. maybe he based the cat on one of his cocaine induced hallucinations. Crazier things have happened.
Wow, a bit off topic there.. Okay so the point is, I don’t really give a rat’s ass about Stephen King. I see his work on bookshelves and become exasperated because that’s how much book shelf space being taken up by shitty writers like him and Michael Connelly, and John Grisham, and Tom Clancy… AND NORA ROBERTS (OH MY FUCK).. like if we just had a public book burning of all that shitty pan-fiction, it would leave infinite room for all the great books that are not read.. like.. On the Road, and House of Leaves and.. I dunno. Brave New World. There’s a pro-tip from the Graveyard.. when you’re next in a bookstore debating on picking up a tattered copy of a Stephen King book, just do the world a favor and punch yourself in the dick and go find a copy of Brave New World or Doors of Perception and I am sure that you will thank us later.

Ok so Carrie.. Carrie. Every teen angst broken hearted black-clad, overweight, outcast goth girl’s dream is to be Carrie White and burn down their high school and exact fiery and also bloody revenge on those who dared do them wrong. Truth is – high school sucks. It really does, but another truth is that it doesn’t actually suck as much as Carrie would have you believe. Sure, Carrie White is the crazy and also creepy religious girl, but let’s put it this way.. for every ‘jock’ or ‘cheerleader’ type, there’s just as many fat, quiet, nerdy, ugly, weird people, and the dichotomy is not as one sided. My issue with the Carrie story is that for her, everyone from teachers and students to random kids in her neighborhood are against her and to top it off, her mom’s a crazy religious nut.. Like talk about a shitty roll of the dice. Christ.
I saw the original Carrie when I was around 11, shortly after I got my first period (the irony is not lost on me) and it was on TNT and edited for television (of which I’m glad.. no 11 year old should ever have to see that much filthy minge or banana titty), and it still seemed so hokey. Like okay, creepy religious girl gets freaky powers and an angel haired hot dude asks her to prom and she doesn’t think anything is going on? What an idiot. Having been a creepy outcast in high school, I have some experience with the role of being the outsider… I certainly wasn’t popular and yep I definitely was picked on.. Until one day I went completely bananas and beat the ever loving fuck out of one dude and we both got suspended. Sure there was still some sidelong whispering going on behind my back, but since I almost broke that kid’s nose when I smashed his face against the gymnasium floor, most people kept their distance. I’ve got a pretty long fuse, and Carrie’s appeared to be about the same length, so as to why she didn’t snap and go insane earlier is a mystery.
The remake is really not too different from the original.. times have changed obviously and the eponymous shower period scene is punctuated with the use of a cellphone to record Carrie’s menses in brutal living color for a Youtube audience. I appreciated this nod to cyber bullying because this is a what kids do now adays and it kept the scene from feeling stale. That said, the Carrie character was not too computer literate so the sting wasn’t really as prevalent as it would have been if say.. she’d had a facebook account.. or a twitter.

The story line is the same, the cast of characters has changed faces and updated for the times, but this movie doesn’t have the fresh faced innocence of the first. Like with most Hollywood features, the cast of twenty somethings is barely playing to their 16 year old roles, and it all just seems really… flat? The original wasn’t great, likely because the story wasn’t too great either, and thus the remake is certainly no hell. Chloe Moretz is beautiful, and truthfully she is too beautiful for the role of Carrie. Carrie is your typical Sarah plain and Tall, and let’s be honest.. Sissy Spacek is horrifying. Do a side by side of Chloe Moretz and Sissy Spacek and you’ve got Miss Universe at the Dog Pound. The remake tries to paint Carrie as uncool by putting her in obvious thrift shop clothes, but the truth is, Carrie is PRETTY, and her dorky outfits look like they cost someone a lot of money at Urban Outfitters. Give her a pair of lenseless hipster glasses and she’d be the coolest girl at school. Since we are on the subject of looks, the role of Tommy Ross was not reprised by a cherubic angel with a head of golden curls like in the original and that is a major loss, if I am being honest. All that aside, the gym teacher played by Judy Greer (who plays an amazing role in Jawbreaker as outsider Fern Mayo) is fucking SMOKING HOT.. I was all ‘forget Carrie White, take off your top’. And that is just cold hard FACT. Like wow. The ticket price is worth it simply for DAT ASS in gym shorts.
I refuse to retell the fucking story of Carrie. Pig’s blood, prom, burns the school down, destruction. The end. Curtain. It’s about the same in this aside from this weird pregnancy sideline thing with Sue Snell which is sort of in the story.. I don’t even know. What I did appreciate was that for the magnificient “Black Prom” scene, Carrie does seem to be “more in control” of her powers than she is in the original – people are flying around (including Carrie at one point) and shit gets real.. as opposed to the original where she sort of stalks through the prom like a cardboard cut out and the school burns around her. I appreciated the movement that was given to her, but at times she looks like she’s conducting an orchestra or re-enacting Fantasia (now that’s the Fantasia I want to see.. Fantasia: the Bath Salts edition).

Truthfully, I liked it more than the original, but I didn’t really care much for the original. It’s worth a look, and I will probably purchase it for novelty’s sake when it’s in the $3.99 bin at the grocery store, but it’s not really doing anything new, but let’s be honest.. neither is Stephen King. I wonder if he was coked to the tits when he wrote this story. I could go on like this.. But I won’t.

Drunk in a Graveyard intoxicant rating – mix all the sweetness you want into this Holy Water of a horror story, but Carrie has a bitter aftertaste and Stephen King is to blame. So like with everything else, I feel that my hipster Carrie would be a great hit.. instead of pig’s blood just drop a bucket of PBR on her.. eh… maybe not.. that could turn into porn a little too quickly and god knows the world doesn’t need more tattooed pseudo Suicide Girls thinking people give a shit about them.. And on that note kids, grab your Bible, put on them hipster glasses, and mix your Holy Waters strong and always stay spooky. Until next time, ya fucks.

Scotty Floronic:

I might not be the right person to go to for a review of Carrie for a few reasons:

1- I’m male and as such I don’t know what it’s like to be a teenage girl
2 – I’m the opposite of religious (unless you count religiously watching Masters of the Universe…does that count guys?)
3 (aka the Biggie) – i really don’t like the original Carrie and think it’s highly overrated

Mind you, with that stating of that third point, maybe I’m the perfect person to review the remake of Carrie? I have no vested interest in it and I won’t gloss over the ugly bits trying to find something to praise. Truth be told, and this is a big scary truth I’m about to drop on you, I actually semi-enjoyed this which in my books makes it BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL. There, I said it. Take a deep breath and think about what you just read. Are you angry? Probably. Did you just navigate away from this page? Likely.

Now that 3/4 of you have stopped reading this I’ll continue on and explain my audacious claims. I always found the original Carrie to be very over the top in the portrayal of this girls torment. Is literally every person in the school the devil and out to get you? Really? I grew up a freckly faced, ginger-as-fuck gangly nerd and experienced some pretty cruel things growing up but never did it seem like absolutely every kid at the school was tormenting me. Again, dude here so no estrogen roller coaster for me so maybe it IS like that? Shit, maybe the over-the-top feel of the original could be chalked up to an immersive experience thing that the director was going for, to simulate that period in a young girls life. I don’t fuckin know nor am I going to look into it because I have better things to do, like rant some more and drink some beer.

This version of Carrie doesn’t fall into the same pitfall of seeming as over-the-top, nor is it nearly as badly acted as the original, though the school does still seem to be populated by an inordinate amount of jocks and preps. There were literally NO alternative kids at this school that I could spot. Now, admittedly, it’s been near a decade since i walked the halls of a high school but I find it hard to believe that there are no kids at this school with funky dyed hair or patchy clothes. I guess that’s pretty convenient for the story as it makes Carrie White the only strange person at the school and the obvious target for everyones bullying though if we’re being honest (and we’re nothing if not honest here in the Graveyard) Carrie just sort of looks like a hipster who had to take her oversized glasses in to LensCrafters for the day to get fixed.

Chloe Grace Moretz, who plays Carrie this go around, does a great job portraying the part of a bullied high school girl with one exception. She’s a little TOO cute looking. I don’t know why, but that just made it harder for me to believe that almost every person in this school hated her. Shit, if I was some kid in high school now, she’s probably the kind of girl I’d awkwardly stammer a prom date offer to after talking myself into it for a few weeks beforehand. On the other hand, maybe that just means I’m attracted to bat shit crazy women. Probably that second one now that I think about it.

While I’m pointing out the good in this movie, I should mention that I really like the prominence of Carrie’s telekinesis in this version as well. It manifests itself much more visibly and makes her mothers feelings towards her seem more understandable. Well, as realistic as the ranting of a jesus crazed maniac can be. I realize that this visibility of her abilities is due to a higher budget and computer graphics being done by everyone and their grandma these days but it still helped add a bit more believability to the climax. Oh the climax, one part X-Men and one part Mean Girls, and probably the most entertaining part of the movie for me. Carrie goes full on Jean Grey as The Pheonix in the 2013 version, tossing people aside like stones and force chocking (yeah I said it) her school mates so hard that Darth Vader would want to adopt her as his own. Carrie also manages to get some face-to-face revenge in this remakes which is kind of nice to see.

Should you go see it? That depends? Do you like the original? Do you froth at the mouth at the mere mention of remakes? IF you answered yes avoid it unless you really need to scratch that horror-movie-in-a-theatre experience in this October strangely bereft of horror offerings. If you’re like me and didn’t enjoy the original or you don’t really give a flying fuck about wether it’s a remake or not, I still wouldn’t recommend you see it in theaters. Wait until it hits the iTunes store or Netlix and watch it then. This way you can yell at the TV at the appropriate moments like you know you love to do