Unholiest, Bloodiest, Blondest.

CARRIE starts with blood. And ends with blood. Startling gouts of life-giving/death-dealing blood. And in between – menstruation, high school, and religious dementia. A true horror movie.

Director Brian De Palma brings Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel Carrie to the big screen in blood and strawberry blonde: Sissy Spacek as Carrie White, perfectly embodying the awkward teen schoolgirl outcast, Piper Laurie sufficiently deranged as Carrie’s biblically-insane religious Mama; sweet curvaceous Nancy Allen as Bad Girl Chris Hargensen; striking Amy Irving as Good Girl Sue Snell, and angular Betty Buckley as sympathetic gym teacher Miss Collins (changed from Ms. Desjardin in the novel). All blonde. All the time.

First period. Bleeding in the shower of the girls’ locker room. Terrified, Carrie cries out for help; we realize she does not understand what menstruation is. Taunted, girls jeering, tampons thrown at her, school principal callous, distraught, Carrie rushes home. We meet Mama, and immediately understand: “Why didn’t you tell me, Mama?” Instead of a sympathetic ear, wild-eyed Mama drags Carrie screaming to The Prayer Closet and locks her in, preaching brimstone for the “sinfulness” of Carrie’s period and that she must pray until forgiven by god. Bloodied Christ on the cross looking down and lending a horror hand.

With her dire ascent into adulthood, Carrie realizes she has gained telekinetic ability – the power to manipulate objects with her mind; devours books on the subject in the library. (Note for young readers: “book” – noun, a written or printed work consisting of pages glued together along one side and bound in a cover. Can be read like any online blog. “Library” – noun, a building containing a collection of books, i.e. olden days internet.)

Teen girl, anti-social, unpretty, confused, bullied incessantly, browbeaten religiously… now with the power to retaliate, with the world as her weapon…

And now – the Boys: there’s a blond (of course!) and a brunette. And like so many movies and shows that feature this duo type, the pretty blond whom we think will conquer the world falls by the wayside in favor of the dark rogue: BOSOM BUDDIES (Scolari and Hanks), STAR WARS (Hamill and Ford), MAD MAX (Goose and Max), BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (Winter and Reeves), GALLIPOLI (Lee and Gibson)… Here, the blond is William Katt as curlicued Tommy, the nonstop dreamiest boy in school and Sue’s boyfriend, whom she cajoles into taking Carrie to the prom, feeling remorse for her bullying and wanting to sincerely atone by offering Carrie an innocent night with her sought after boytoy. (So sad that Katt’s only recognizable legacy is ultimately THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO, 1981). While unrepentant Chris Hargensen dates a dark horse, a dreamy-eyed thug who can’t quite act, in his first featured film role “…and introducing John Travolta.” (In one short year, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER would catapult Travolta into the night sky amongst the panoply of stars.)

This simple tale of revenge is unfurled creatively: screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen hones King’s story to its barest emotional beats and director De Palma keeps us on edge by framing it furtively, like the angles a wild, caged animal might see. Once again disproving King’s own aphorism, “It is the tale, not he who tells it.” I’ve always disagreed with this simplistic notion. It is not the tale, but he who tells it. Were this straightforward juggernaut in the hands of a lesser director, well… just see what they did in 2002. (With that inferior remake, we can see how integral director and budget are to telling a tale. King has suffered much ignominy after his initial spate of quality adaptations (SALEM’S LOT, THE SHINING, THE DEAD ZONE), so he should be the first to admit that “the tale” is nothing without a good “teller.”)

For leading the bullying girls, unrepentant Chris is suspended from school (and the prom – heavens, no!), so plots to get even with Carrie, enlisting her Sweathog boyfriend to kill a real hog and drain its blood, planting the bucket above the stage at the prom hall. I tell ya, with all the Machiavellian plotting Chris achieves to place Carrie directly under that bucket on prom night, she should be either a politician or a hitman. Unravel one thread and the plot falls to pieces.

Thus, the iconic scenes of Carrie onstage during her one moment of joy – drenched in blood. A metaphor that teen girls and the teen guys trying to make them during the wrong phase of the moon are well acquainted with. De Palma splits his screen into comicbook frames, so we can see Carrie’s deathly stare and the results of her telekinetic retaliation simultaneously. With each mental strike, a violin shriek (PSYCHO copyrights be damned!). The school burns. All those who laughed now scream in agony. Because of its revenge premise, CARRIE has always seemed more visceral satisfaction than horror.

The horror is Jesus. And Mama’s ungodly love of him.

When Carrie stumbles home for solace in the arms of Mama, Jesus just won’t let Mama go, as he whispers in Mama’s ear that the devil in Carrie has to be killed with a big knife to the shoulder blades. Carrie’s last stroke is to crucify Mama with bladed implements. Back in 1976, these beats were not played offhandedly as nowadays they are, to a generation inured to creative one-dimensional violence. Back then, a daughter telekinetically stabbing her mother to death birthed a new horror genre. And we can see the emotional cost of each action on the characters’ faces. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie received Academy Award nominations for their performances.

And everyone lived blondely every after.

END

Super Dupe-r.

Didn’t somebody already make SUPER and call it KICK-ASS?

In SUPER, Rainn Wilson (THE ROCKER) is the putty-muscled nerd who has had enough of bad guys, adorning himself in flamboyant, ill-fitting costume and pipe-wrench, to become the scourge of small-time hoods with his catch-cry, “Shut up, crime!”

Like his counterpart in KICK-ASS, Frank D’Arbo (Wilson) also wonders why no one else has taken it upon themselves to fight back. (Uh, maybe because the type of crime that warrants fighting back against is the exact type that will kill you faster than a speeding bullet – this includes anyone carrying a gun up to the corporate swine responsible for the disparity in wealth disbursement in society.) But the paradoxical concept of the costumed vigilante “super” hero has embedded itself so deeply into modern culture that director-writer James Gunn can get away with yet another epigone with little explanation or apology.

The Chartreuse Bolt

Frank is a virtually friendless fast food cook, who leads such a drudgerous life that he has immortalized its best two moments in two small cartoons framed on his wall: his unlikely marriage to Sarah (Liv Tyler), and the moment he helped foil a robbery. When Sarah falls prey to the drugging and thugging life and is stolen away by twitchy, ostentatious sociopath Jacques (Kevin Bacon, bringing the same charismatic cheese he just fried in X-MEN FIRST CLASS), Frank can take it lying down no longer and hits the streets as Crimson Bolt (mainly to win back Sarah, and fighting any crime that gets in his way). Comics geek Libby (Ellen Page) blithely follows him into the heart of darkness as his sidekick Boltie.

At first blush, SUPER seems just another plagiaristic permutation of Hero-Without-Powers, but Rainn Wilson’s studied performance lends a touching pathos to Frank that all us downtrodden mortals can relate to. He pendulums between drama and comedy  surprisingly well, and there is a bittersweet throughline that is only fully appreciated during the film’s final frames.

Like KICK-ASS, I applaud SUPER for its brutality, but in taking lethal situations to their logical end, director Gunn loses his way with the tone. In KICK-ASS director Mathew Vaughn had the right idea – retaining the black humor through to the cool ending sequences, and when he did drama, he didn’t try for incongruous levity. SUPER dips into very disturbing drama – the context of the violence becomes serious rather than comedic – when Frank goes postal on Jacques’s henchmen. Laugh or grimace? No amount of cheesy “KAPOW” or “BAM” signs can palliate the moment when Frank tips from righteous vigilante into pathological killer.

But the rape scene is definitely cause for black laughter. And interfering with yourself. As Chloe Moretz was the underage sexually-enticing female in KICK-ASS, here Ellen Page fills the role with barely-legal spinner sultriness and flat-chested brio. Libby (Page) is ambivalent toward Frank but her costumed alter ego Boltie erotically craves the Crimson Bolt’s electric telegraph pole. Yes, SHE rapes HIM. Apparently, this kind of super-hero fetishism is called cos-play.

When Boltie looks on lustfully at Crimson Bolt battling henchmen, it is a nod to our ancestral DNA; a primal, tribal courtship dance – watching a boyfriend beat up someone – reflecting the evolutionarily sound tactic of choosing mates strong enough to defend one’s family unit. On film, it can be traced back at least to Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), as she watches her leathered boyfriend doing something violent, dumb smile and glazed-eyed, orgasmic thrill on her face. In civilized society, it isn’t proper to surface your emotions like that and it has become a form of sociopathy – which it is in Boltie’s case. She goes Wolverine, with a couple of steel claws on her gloves, and extracts a madman’s glee from carving up suspected bad guys. Wait– “suspected”? When Crimson Bolt realizes Boltie doesn’t care if they’re guilty, he knows something is awry in her crime-fighting wiring – but it’s so hot we don’t care at that point…

Just as Nic Cage played the Real Super in KICK-ASS, here comes Nathan Fillion (FIREFLY) – tongue planted firmly in ass-cheek – as an evangelical Super called The Holy Avenger. With Rob Zombie as the Voice of God.

Like most superhero movies (even the ones who have real powers), SUPER only deals with the lowest cogs of crime. If Crimson Bolt wants to fight for his lady love, that’s his prerogative, but if he wants to battle actual “crime,” then waiting in an alley behind an industrial trash bin for crime to come along – though hilarious – is still only targeting what we have been conditioned to believe is “crime” even though any people perpetrating illegal acts in an alley near an industrial trash bin are actually just the RESULTS of crime – crime created by the highest echelons of society responsible for disparity in wealth due to avarice and politics.

Okay, let’s not go there – I can hear you through the internet tubes: “It’s just a movie!” I’m just sayin’: His catchcry of “Shut up crime!” implies he is aiming much higher than a footloose pimp who steals his wife.

Accompanying Frank’s battle with quasi-crime, a score by Tyler Bates and a great rock and rap soundtrack (featuring Cheap Trick, Moneybrother, Tsar, Bill Boll, The Nomads, Aceyalone); cutesy 2D dancing cartoons serve up the opening titles.

The story resolves most unexpectedly. Though it has its faults, SUPER has a depth that will go unnoticed by most who think it is a simple superhero comedy. For not catering to Chick Flick Romantic Protocol alone, it is applause-worthy; for tying up Frank’s character arc emotionally, it is bravura; and for letting us lust openly after someone who looks like she’s just learned how to apply her training bra – now that’s just kick-ass!

END