Chapter Two - The Rage: Carrie 2 and The Curse of the Cat People
By Brett Beach
October 31, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
This year my girlfriend and I are going on a tour of a historic cemetery where actors embodying the "untimely departed" will relate stories behind some of the more notable deaths and notorious deceased. It strikes me as being fairly a hoot. It also puts me in the mood for scary sequels. This being the witching season, this week I have chosen to share some appropriately themed Chapter Twos to a pair of lesser-known horror sequels. Although to be honest, neither of them is really a horror film. Whether this will dilute your enjoyment or not I can't say, but both are worth seeking out, particularly as one of them is on my list of all-time beloved films. But first - you knew it was coming - a slight detour must be hazarded.
Not that you asked (then again, maybe you did?) but sequels are far from the only films that I watch. It's true, they now take up the lion's share of my time - cinematically speaking - but this has not always been the case. I feel that I have shared enough of myself in the past six months that the time has now come to broach that question that dwells above all other queries for a cinephile: what are your favorite movies?
I have always maintained that first and foremost, a film should be entertaining. I enjoy critiquing a film, dissecting it and discussing it, especially in order to determine why I reacted to it the way I did. I would never get any enjoyment out of blathering on in a scholarly or knowledgeable way about a film that I loathed. I feel those types who can adopt that pose belong in a partitioned-off area on one of the levels of Dante's rings of Hell. A film may have great intentions, weighty subject matter, a fine pedigree, and excellent technical credits but if it doesn't come together into something involving, it's all for naught.
This is where I must offer the caveat that for me the spectrum that encompasses the word "entertainment" is a vast and far-flung enterprise. Case in point: the opening shot of Bruno Dumont's emotionally grueling and deliberately paced provocation L'Humanite, from 2002. The camera observes a tiny figure in the distance as it begins running across the top of a hill. If you were to guess that the camera holds that shot for the two minutes or so it takes for the character to cross from one edge of the frame to the other, you either know your French cinema or you have masochistic tendencies. I love long tracking shots and static shots alike and from that moment I was as entranced as I was by the floating feather at the beginning of Forrest Gump.
Without verging off course to consider either of them with a close critical eye, I will offer that in response to the self-directed question three paragraphs above, I would reply: Stanley Kubrick's 1975 "costume drama" Barry Lyndon and Sergio Leone's 1983 gangster/fairy tale Once Upon a Time in America (the full four-hour version, just in case that possibly needs clarification.) These are my favorite films, my desert island films, and films that I believe belong as a part of any discussion centered on "the best of all time, etc." They are both, as are a lot of my other all-time favorites, epic productions, extreme in length and scope and vision. They are still undervalued I think, which perhaps explains part of my affinity towards them. All of Kubrick's films gain with the passage of time and a critical reevaluation and Barry Lyndon may be the last one still not as appreciated as it could and should be. The marriage of costume design, art direction, musical score, cinematography, voiceover (oh god, but I do love voiceover narration, a topic for another time) and yes, despite what you may have heard, great acting from Ryan O'Neal and Marisa Berenson is inscrutable. I hate the cliché "It's a beautiful film to look at," but Barry Lyndon is staggeringly gorgeous and so much more.
America is, along with Miller's Crossing, among the best of the latter-day gangster films this country has produced and I prefer either of them to the now embalmed and enshrined Godfather films. A stately, leisurely paced tale spanning decades (or maybe not), it features an uncharacteristically quiet and haunted performance from Robert DeNiro and an achingly melancholic score by Ennio Morricone. I must confess to being quite shocked when only three years ago I saw Once Upon A Time in the West for the first time and discovered that the very last shot of OUATIA mirrors a key shot in OUATITW. Around such humbling realizations and discoveries is the life of a critic built. And with that, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
To some, it may be desecration that a sequel to Carrie even exists. I try to keep the concept of desecration in relative terms especially when writing about sequels, many upon many of which have no good reason to exist. Making truckloads of money does not qualify as a good reason. The Rage: Carrie 2, released in the spring of 1999, 23 years after the original, can be considered strictly in terms of a studio's (MGM) attempt at bottom-feeding and sucking a few more dollars out of a property by seeing if a franchise can be borne. It opened March 12th and led the pack among the five new wide releases that weekend but still only wound up with an $18 million final gross against a $21 million budget. The moments of The Rage where it works the hardest to forge ties to its predecessor, via key flashback scenes or plot twists, are the ones that smell the most of commerce. Luckily, director Katt Shea and writer Rafael Moreu have more up their sleeve and a surprisingly good little exploitation flick rises up to the occasion in its final moments and transforms into a moving romantic tragedy, albeit one marked with decapitation, evisceration and castration.
How is The Rage connected to Carrie? Primarily, through the character of Sue Snell (played by Amy Irving back then and here as well), one of the only survivors of the prom massacre wrought by Carrie White at the end of the first film. She is now a high school counselor contending with a school where the football team jocks keep score and award points for the girls with which their teammates have had sex. This leads one heart-broken lass to take a tumble off the school roof. Her best friend, Rachel, finds the anger and pain at this loss leading to a return of childhood telekinetic powers. Sue uncovers that Carrie and Rachel share the same father, a now-deceased travelling salesman, and that this explains their shared powers: the genetic marker is a trait passed along by the male. Rachel's mother is also as messed up as Carrie's once was and is a long-time resident of the local asylum.
I threw that description together to prove the point that yes, The Rage does go to great lengths to tie back to the first film and that it handles these moments about as well as my convoluted summary would lead you to believe. Shea (who is perhaps best remembered for helming the 1992 Drew Barrymore erotic thriller Poison Ivy) also employs clumsy attempts to emulate Brian DePalma's signature style with cuts to black and white and distorted camera angles during key moments of intensity. These, however, are not where the film's heart and interest lie. The Rage is foremost a fairly biting critique of high school rituals and accepted behavior, especially as adults make allowances for and/or encourage this. Even Mark, the key "bad guy" among the males, played with the right amount of charm and thuggish machismo by Dylan Bruno, isn't immune from castigation by his coach. "Drop trou," he barks, as the team watches game footage from the previous week, and explains, "I wanted to see if you've got a tampon string hanging between your legs." That line smartly ties back to the opening of the first film which (and if you're a man you may have done yourself a favor and forced this out of your memory) features the PE class in the girls' locker room pelting Carrie with tampons and screaming "Plug it up!" as she gets her first period in the showers.
If that film tied Carrie's powers to her becoming a woman and made the implication of what a horrific thing that is (sexual maturation) to happen, The Rage is more broad-minded in its indictment. The boys, girls, school officials and adults are complicit in allowing things to continue as they do in the school and Rachel's vicious retribution at the end is her bid to level the playing field, as it were. Sue's unexpectedly swift and brutal exit from the film punches this point home in a hard to-miss-fashion. Running counter to the long build-up towards the climax is the evolution of Rachel's relationship with Jesse, one of the players on the team. Their romance is tentative at first but believable and sweet, which makes the ending of the film that much more wrenching. I would be curious to know if the Raimi brothers had The Rage in mind while writing Drag Me To Hell because the last shot of that film has strong echoes with the final shot in The Rage, in that both invert the "Final Girl" cliché of a lot of horror films. The audience is left instead to witness the confusion, sadness and guilt of a man having lost the woman he loves and doomed to live in memory with the image of her being taken from him.
Emily Bergl made her feature debut in The Rage. She has worked steadily and extensively over the last ten years, mostly in TV and is perhaps now best known from appearing in the miniseries Taken or for her role as Annie on the comedy-drama Men in Trees. I have only caught her once or twice in other films so I can't speak for how she has or hasn't grown/altered as an actress, but if you see The Rage for only one reason, watch it for her. As Rachel, Bergl gives a peerless performance. There is confidence mixed with shyness, sexiness mixed with goofiness, and gentleness mixed with, well, rage. She comes across as more of an ordinary (re: complex) teenage girl than most Hollywood movies ever make allowances for. Her chemistry with Jason London (as Jesse) is sublime and isn't about the hot and heavy bump n' grind - tough there is that - but more about that idealistic first love where you have found someone with whom you connect and feel free to be yourself. We feel that loss at the end, and just because it comes in a violent horror movie, doesn't make it any less moving.
The Curse of the Cat People stands in my mind as the only case where the producer of the film wanted to change the title because he thought it was deceptive and misleading to audiences. Take a bow, Val Lewton! Lewton's name is still synonymous 60 years later with high-quality B movies made on infinitesimal budgets. With only 14 productions over ten years (before his untimely death in 1951), Lewton collaborated with talented writers, directors and design teams to create dread and suspense when the money and time for special effects did not exist. In spite of or due to these restraints, titles like Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Body Snatcher and Isle of the Dead still have an aura of spookiness around them and aren't so easily dismissed as quaint relics of an earlier horror era. Cat People, from 1942, was his first production and features a classic scene of a woman in an indoor swimming pool being stalked by the title creature. Using only shadows and sound and a slashed robe, director Jacques Tourneur conjures up mood and menace. The story, of a woman frightened of her passion because she believes it can cause her to transform into a panther, is grounded in psychological realism - although the profession takes it on the chin as her psychiatrist/would-be savior becomes the only victim - and quietly effective performances.
The film was a hit and understandably RKO Studios wanted a follow-up. With Lewton producing, the screenwriter (DeWitt Bodeen) returning and actors Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Jane Randolph appearing as their same characters, one might imagine a prototypical sequel. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are no cat people and only one cat (added in at the studio's request during reshoots) in 1944's The Curse of The Cat People. Instead, there is a gentle and perceptive, though quite odd, drama about childhood fantasy and loneliness. Gone is the shadowy city of Cat People, replaced by an archetypal 1940s suburbia, with the obligatory Gothic and imposing "house where a strange lady lives" just down the street. The sequel is even more steeped in psychology than the first as parents Oliver and Alice Reed attempt to understand their imaginative, withdrawn daughter Amy and become concerned when her new imaginary friend appears to be the ghost of Oliver's first wife, Irina.
Many of the particular details of the film are taken from Lewton's childhood, even the setting of Tarrytown, NY where Washington Irving wrote about The Headless Horseman. Clocking in at only 70 minutes, there is an almost indescribably queer (as in unusual) quality to the film. Troubled as the production may have been (the first director was replaced by editor Robert Wise, who launched his career behind the camera here), there are no hints of that in the finished product. What is most unsettling is its earnestness and all of its unanswered questions. There is a fable-like air about the film, much talk about how important a girl's sixth birthday is, and even the implication that a part of a child dies or becomes altered as it reaches that age. There are also indirect indications (notably through direct denials) that Amy is really Irina's child. Oliver and Alice seem to have a peculiarly loveless marriage, or perhaps they are still haunted by the events of the first film and can't quite bring themselves to break that "curse." Even the climax of The Curse of the Cat People mingles relief with the melancholic suggestion that something has been lost or broken that cannot be fixed. The studio did their best to let people expect that the "black menace would creep again" but I would love to have seen the faces of an opening night crowd for this film, and then gauged their reactions over some coffee and pie afterwards. Seemingly simple, the film is fairly inscrutable and mystifying and yes, entertaining.
Next time: It made over $400 million domestic at the box office this summer. What is there left to say about it? I will do my darndest to find something.