Welcome to the first week of Sundays with Stephen here at HCT. As you could guess from the IMDB page for Stephen King, the first movie we have to talk about is 1976′s Carrie, starring Sissy Spacek, and directed by Brian De Palma, later of Scarface and The Untouchables fame. Carrie was not only the first King movie, it was also the first novel he had published.

Where to begin… I’m not sure how to talk about this film. I had absorbed through cultural osmosis that this was supposed to be one of the ‘good’ King movies, one of the serious films that translated well to the screen. The passage of time might well be a factor, though the DVD version is quite good and it seems like the masters must have been kept in nice condition over the years; visually everything is clear and sharp (at least when De Palma wanted it to be).

The first thing to say about this movie is that it’s not at all *subtle*. Everything is made painfully obvious and the movie’s themes are savagely beaten into the audience. Almost all characters are 1-dimensional, and those with a limited amount of depth (like Sue Snell) are mostly notable for having depth at all; in a way, they’re still 1-dimensional, but now their dimension is ‘depth’.

You know where you’re going with this one when Carrie uses her powers for the first time and a Psycho style screechy horror sound effect goes off; this repeats a couple of minutes later when an unfortunate ashtray gets a one way trip to smashytown. If the audience at the time didn’t already know how this was going to end, as we do now, then surely they must have realized it wasn’t going to be a *happy* ending.

Everything in the film is like that. Sets are over the top, with Carrie’s house a tomb dressed up in cheap religious merch right out of The 700 Club’s spring catalog, and the camera work tries way, way too hard, with lots of odd angles, shots from way above or below the characters, etc. Sometimes these scenes seem to exist only to show off where De Palma managed to fit a camera; there’s a short scene in the movie where Carrie’s mom aggressively chops a carrot with a big knife, shown from the POV of.. the kitchen ceiling light. I have no idea what that brought to the table. Carrie also shows that De Palma is a huge fan of soft-focus camera work and shower scenes with teenage girls, because you’ll get far more than your quota of both in this picture. Especially the shower scene at the beginning, which might make you wonder if there was a pressing error at the manufacturer and you’d gotten a women’s prison movie (or juvie hall movie, I suppose) from Skinemax by mistake, if this was your first time viewing.

Added bonus: right before the climactic prom scene, there’s a ‘camera swirling around the characters’ sequence that could literally make you throw up, if you’re sensitive to nausea-inducing carnival rides. It goes on, and on, and on… I wonder how many people never got to see the end of the first flick because they had to leave for the bathroom in the theatre, ala Cloverfield.

There are obvious plot holes too, but since I haven’t read the original book I can’t speculate on who’s to blame. The biggest for me is that, in the movie at least, the bucket of pig’s blood (gasp! spoilers from before I was born!) is placed above the stage for the prom days before the event, and before the gym is ever decorated. Err, what? It would have stunk like a… well, a slaughterhouse, in there. There would have been swarms of flies! There’s actually a scene where a character realizes the bucket is there, in part, because a piece of streamer that had been placed next to it on the rafter falls down to the floor… how could you put up a streamer a foot away from a bucket of rotting pig’s blood and not know it was there?

The big finish to the movie makes no sense, and a little post-hoc dream sequence that wraps up the film with a fakeout ending feels tacked on and exploitative. Apparently the whole town blames Carrie for the deaths at the prom, despite there very obviously being no surviving witnesses (at least, none the audience is aware of). I can believe scapegoating the borderline retarded girl up to a point in a small redneck town, but honestly, if there was a major fire in your home burg, would your first thought be ‘It must’ve been the retard! Let’s desecrate ‘er grave, boys!’ Even if your daily intake of liquids consisted solely of PBR and instant coffee?

So I’m afraid Carrie gets a pretty lousy endorsement here on Sundays with Stephen. It’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, and unlike some of the movies we’ll get to later, it won’t break your faith in a loving God, presuming you have such a thing.

It’s not one of the ‘good’ King movies though.

Next Week: Jack Nicholson rocks the joint in The Shining.
Last Week: There is no last week. There is only Zuul.