I don’t think anyone was ever asking for a sequel to the 1976 Stephen King adaptation Carrie. The possibility of one certainly never crossed my mind. Carrie was a standalone story. Teen girl with telekinetic abilities and a strictly religious, mentally ill mother is bullied at school and ends up using her telekinesis to wipe out her tormentors (and a lot of innocent bystanders) at the school prom. After, of course, her bullies dump a bucket of pig blood on her head. The story ends with Carrie, her mom, and her bullies all dead. There was nowhere for it go. The sequel door was closed... But MGM / United Artists thought differently, so twenty-three years after Brian De Palma’s version of Carrie was released, we got a sequel called The Rage: Carrie 2. There’s no reason for this movie to exist beyond the studio’s hope for financial reward... But I’m glad it does exist, because it turned out to be a better movie than anyone probably would have expected.
Directed by Katt Shea (who joined the project after Robert Mandel departed due to creative differences two weeks into production, but reshot all the scenes Mandel had already shot) from a screenplay by Rafael Moreau, Carrie 2 is – despite the title – not about Carrie at all. Carrie is dead and has been for twenty years. The lead character is teenager Rachel Lang, played by Emily Bergl, who delivers an impressive performance in her screen acting debut. Like Carrie, Rachel has a troubled home life. In this case, her mentally ill mother has been institutionalized since Rachel was a child, leaving her to grow up in the foster system, and her current foster parents only keep her around because they like getting the check they receive for being foster parents. Like Carrie, Rachel is an outsider at her high school, but in a very different way. She isn’t meek or sheltered like Carrie was. She knows what the world around her is like, she’s a strong character, she just isn’t part of the popular crowd. She does have a best friend, Mena Suvari as Lisa, and they’re so close they even have matching tattoos of a heart wrapped in thorns.
And like Carrie, Rachel has telekinetic abilities... she just doesn’t embrace this fact because she fears she’s going crazy like her mom did.
As the story of Carrie 2 plays out, it becomes increasingly difficult for Rachel to keep her telekinesis reined in. The trouble begins when Lisa confides in her that she lost her virginity to a boy at their school, and she’s going to introduce Rachel to this boy during lunch. But there is no introduction. Instead, during the lunch period Lisa commits suicide by jumping from the roof of the school. It quickly becomes apparent to Rachel and the viewer why this has happened: the boy who took Lisa’s virginity, football player Eric (Zachery Ty Bryan) didn’t actually care about her at all. He only had sex with her because he and the other jocks have a notebook where they keep score of their sexual activity, giving each other points based on which girls they have sex with. Lisa was just a way for Eric to boost his score.
Things get worse for Rachel. Her dog Walter is hit by a car... but thankfully, he survives because football player Jesse (Jason London) happens to be passing by at that moment. Jesse gives Rachel and Walter a ride to the veterinarian. And then Jesse and Rachel keep talking after that. A romantic relationship develops. This isn’t a negative thing in itself, because – while he has reluctantly participated in some of the sexual scorekeeping – Jesse isn’t like the other jocks. He actually has some human decency, and there are some sweet scenes between him and Rachel that allow you to buy into their love story. The problem is, others in Jesse’s social circle don’t approve of him spending time with Rachel, and they set out to do some terrible things to make him and Rachel realize they shouldn’t be together.
Bergl’s endearing performance is what really draws a receptive viewer into the story of The Rage: Carrie 2... and we become even more involved when we see just how despicable the villains of the story are. Played by Dylan Bruno, Justin Urich, Elijah Craig, and the aforementioned Zachery Ty Bryan, the jocks and their female pals played by Charlotte Ayanna and Rachel Blanchard are absolutely disgusting people. And they’re disgusting in the, “I’ve encountered people like this” way. Douchebags like this really do walk among us, so the scorekeeping jocks side of the story is completely believable. In fact, Moreau based that entire storyline on a real sex scandal.
We know the script is going to build up to Rachel using her telekinesis to get her revenge for what the jocks and their cohorts do to her. But as satisfying as the violence is going to be to watch, we don’t want things to get to that point, because we want Rachel to have a happier ending than Carrie did.
Someone who tries to avoid the violent conclusion is the guidance counselor at Rachel’s school, who happens to be returning Carrie character Sue Snell, with Amy Irving reprising the role. Sue tried to help Carrie, and it ended in tragedy. Now she tries to help Rachel as well... And while trying to help her, she discovers the source of Rachel’s telekinetic abilities. Turns out Carrie and Rachel had the same father, Ralph White. And while King confirmed in his novel Carrie that telekinesis is a genetic condition (always recessive in males; only females can actually be telekinetic) and that Ralph White carried the TK gene, he also said that Ralph had died before Carrie was born. While crafting the ‘76 adaptation, De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen had inadvertently made a loophole that allowed for this sequel to be made: they said Ralph left Carrie and her mother behind to run off with another woman. Ralph was left alive to father another telekinetic daughter, and we still don’t meet him in this movie, so presumably he’s still out there spreading the TK gene around some more.
I love sequels, but Carrie sequel is not something I had ever considered. But when they went ahead and made one, I was curious. I went to see The Rage: Carrie 2 on opening weekend and was really impressed at what the filmmakers had done with the concept. A sequel no one had asked for was actually good! Many more viewings of Carrie 2 have followed over the years, as I bought the film on DVD as soon as it was available. Now I've been a fan of the movie for a longer period of time than the number of years that passed between the release of Carrie and this sequel.
MGM / UA had discovered that very few people were interested in the idea of a Carrie follow-up, since the film was a box office failure. But I hope it did better on home video, because it deserved to be more successful than it was. What seems like a soulless cash-in from the outside actually does have a heart. And not just the ones in Rachel and Lisa’s tattoos.
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