Emily Bergl in "The Rage: Carrie 2."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: Emily Bergl and Jason London Director: Katt Shea Rated: R, with profanity, violence, nudity and sexuality Length: 104 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(March 12, 1999) -- When a hit movie leaves you wondering, "I wonder what will happen to those characters next," chances are there's someone (a producer or studio) willing to answer your question with a sequel.

And some movies literally cry out for sequels. Brian De Palma's Carrie, however, wasn't one of them.

Indeed, De Palma summed it up rather nicely, at the end of his supernatural tragedy about a misunderstood telekinetic girl who uses her powers to kill almost everyone in her high school: Most of the main characters, including Carrie herself, died. And he did it with one of the great boo! moments in horror movie history.

Just because almost everyone died apparently does not preclude The Rage: Carrie 2 23 years later. "It's genetics!" cries Sue Snell (Amy Irving), the only survivor to return for the sequel, to Rachel Lang (Emily Bergl), a teen who appears to have the same gifts as the late Carrie White. Both girls have the same father.

Now that's more of an explanation than De Palma ever gave in his adaptation of Stephen King's novel. But we've learned a lot about these things in the intervening quarter-decade.

The Rage is less a sequel than a 90210-flavored remake, utilizing an almost identical storyline. Like Carrie, Rachel is a high school outcast; like Carrie, she manifests psychic powers. Like Carrie -- her older, half-sister -- she is publicly humiliated and gets revenge by killing her tormentors in one big burst of mental mojo.

Where Carrie was an outcast because she lived with a protective, religiously nutty mother, Rachel is a Marilyn Manson lover in a Backstreet Boys world, full of gung-ho, sexual predator jocks. In fact, the school football team is keeping a running log of the various underclassmen they've been able to bed (then ditch).

Rachel's best friend Lisa (Mena Suvari) is one of their victims. Having surrendered her virginity to the gridder in question, Lisa doesn't take the news well that she was only a tally in a diary and kills herself by jumping off the school roof.

Rachel, meanwhile, has attracted the attention of the one nice guy on the football team, Jesse (Jason London). Needless to say, Jesse's pals don't take it well when Rachel becomes a witness in the statutory rape case against the guy who slept with the underage Lisa before she killed herself.

Sue Snell, meanwhile, is now the school's guidance counselor, and recognizes a little bit of Carrie in Rachel. Babbling on about how it's a genetic condition, she springs Rachel's crazy mother from the asylum to try to reason with her.

Director Katt Shea can't rise above what, at least in her hands, is both an obvious and ludicrous premise. For shock value, Shea occasionally switches into distorted black-and-white. At first, that seems to be a method of signaling us that we're seeing the world from Rachel's point of view until the black-and-white scene in which we're seeing Rachel herself.

As the raging Rachel, Bergl is an unappealing young actress, particularly when her anger triggers a skein of vine-like veins that pop out like tattoos all over her face and arms. It is never explained why she is unable to stop her bursts of telekinetic energy one day and the next she's using it to rewind and replay a moment on a videocassette as though it were an extra set of hands.