THE RAGE: CARRIE 2
Call the cops, I've been Burgl-ed!

  Man, that Mena Suvari had better watch out and get some more diverse roles before she's typecast as "virginity-losing chick".  That's three movies in one year in which her character loses it!  (or almost loses it)  And I thought Kevin Costner was having problems getting role outside of the "world-saving baseball player" box.

The big reason I rented this right now instead of waiting a while for the price to go down - I wasn't really that curious about the film itself - is that I noticed there was a new Paradise Lost song on the soundtrack.  And I was curious to see how far they've slithered down their "yes, we ARE The Cure" path.  The song isn't actually in the movie, just on the CD, but by all reports, they've REALLY slithered.

The title of this movie suggests that it's about the further prom-enlivening adventures of one late Carrie White, but no.  It's twenty years later all right, but Carrie's still dead.  One of her old tormentors is up and about though; it's Sue Snell (Amy Irving), who's now a high school guidance counselor, the ideal job for somebody who throws tampons and yells "Mop it up!" at helpless girls who are menstruating for the first time.  Her character is mostly incidental, though - the real star is Emily Bergl, who plays Rachel, a young student at the school.

Rachel, as you might have guessed, has telekinetic powers.  But she ain't no Carrie - Rachel's got a pretty good head on her shoulders.  Her mom flipped out on her when she was about five or so and got hauled away to a place with padded walls, so she was taken in by some foster parents who get $300 a month to make sure she doesn't get eaten by a bear or something.  She grows up discouraged, and a little lonely, but strong-willed, with a lid on her powers, smart and actually pretty charming.  Until the day her best - well, only ? friend (Suvari) kills herself, and then her dog's run over by a car, and...well, it's a bad day.  Then she and a hunky football player (Jason London) start hitting it off, much to the ire of the other players and romantic interests, and...yeah, the rest, you can figure out.

The ads made it all look like it was really trying to carbon-copy the original film, with a football game (and subsequent house party) sitting in for the prom, and this is not a sequel trying very hard to distinguish itself from its predecessor.  But it does have something special happening here, and that's Bergl, who while not always served well by Rafael "Hackers" Moreu's script, nevertheless creates the most appealing and compelling heroine of the teen horror flicks we've seen in the past three years.

The suicide that touches things off is pulled off perfectly by director Katt Shea.  We're fooled into thinking this is going to be one of those glamorous movie suicides where everything's in slo-mo with angelic choirs playing, and then, BAM!  Sucker punch.  I love it when a movie sucker-punches me.  I do not, however, like it very much when drunken homeless guys sucker-punch me.

Now, I'm afraid I've made all this sound better than it really is.  The Rage: Carrie 2 is, in the end, not a very good movie.  I mentioned the suicide scene for a reason - for just one moment, the movie took that extra step.  It reached out, it tried harder, it took off the gloves.  But overall, this is a very safe and restrained movie, with too many formulas for it to stay afloat for 104 minutes.

At this school, the girls all look their age but the guys are all played by actors who are in some cases older than I am.  (my God, is that Sugar Ray?) These guys form one of those intra-competitive societies you sometimes hear about, where they've got this black book, a list of the girls each of them have had sex with, point ratings assigned to each girl, you get the idea.  Zachary Ty Bryan, that kid we all hated (along with everything else) from Home Improvement, is the only guy who looks his age, playing a member of this clique who's just too stupid to have any genuine malevolence, though he is ultimately played for a villain.

Irving puts in the kind of listless, I-can't-wait-to-get-out-of-here performance you'd expect from somebody who won't actually need to work again until the earth is swallowed up by the sun.  The male clique is composed of one-dimensional rich-asshole stereotypes; their female cheerleader counterparts, the same.

The plot has lots of silly crap, like the world's most conveniently easy asylum-break.  Or the point in the second half when all those rich asshole guys shave their heads, as if we're being told "LOOK!  THEY'RE LIKE HORRIBLE NAZI FASCIST SKINHEADS!  HATE THEM!"  One major character is written out by having her just kinda leave.  And what's with that scene where Sugar Ray is made by his coach to drop his drawers?  Every line from every character is delivered so stiltedly that it feels like the scene's supposed to be interpreted as a dream or something. 

It's entirely too long before the inevitable, climactic outburst of Rachel's rage (I dig the way her thorny tattoo crawls all over her body for it), but at least when it gets there, it's bloody as hell.  Much of it is pretty silly (when she turns a CD collection into a flying swarm of digital death), but there are some pleasantly unpleasant surprises...one moment involving a fireplace poker is as close as the movie comes to sucker-punching again.  Unfortunately, this telekinetic temper tantrum brings to a halt Bergl's acting (for this, she basically stands around and looks mean), and Shea's direction goes into MTV mode.  And if there's some sort of significance to that final shot, I missed it.

No sir, I can't recommend this movie to you, but every time Bergl got to strut her stuff, I really, really wanted to.  That girl's got a future.  This series - if indeed it can be called that with but two entries separated by 23 years - has not.

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