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The Rage Carrie 2
USA 1999
Date of release and where the movie is set
Reviewed by Kim Newman
Reviewers Name
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise
twists.
Detailed Plot of
Movie
Bates High School, Ca., the present. Rachel Lang, raised by
foster parents because her mother Barbara is institutionalised, is
shocked when her best friend Lisa commits suicide. Lisa had
been deflowered and dumped by Eric, a star football player, as
part of a contest organised by team-mate Mark: members of the
Bates High Bulldogs compete to see who can seduce the most
girls. Guidance counsellor Sue Snell, sole survivor of the prom
night 20 years ago when Carrie White burned down the school,
notices Rachel has abilities similar to Carrie's. She visits
Barbara in the asylum, and learns Rachel is Carrie's long-lost
sister.
Rachel brings Eric's crime to the attention of the authorities,
exciting the enmity of Mark and the team. She also starts a
relationship with sensitive football-player Jesse Ryan, which
sets Jesse's ex-girlfriend Tracy and her friend Monica against
her. An apparently conciliatory Monica and Mark invite Rachel
to a big party but she is humiliated there when Mark screens a
video of Rachel and Jesse having sex. Lashing out with
telekinesis, Rachel murders Eric, Monica, Mark, Tracy and
most of other guests. She also accidentally kills Sue, who has
sprung Barbara from the asylum. Barbara rejects Rachel, whom
she believes is possessed by the Devil. Rachel resists Jesse's
attempt to stay with her, telekinetically throwing him to safety
while she burns to death. A year later, Jesse is still haunted by
dreams of Rachel.
Review
Talks about the
background of
Movie. Eg. Prequels
Given that a film-going generation has come and gone since
Brian De Palma's 1976 film of Stephen King's 1974
breakthrough novel Carrie, it's surprising that the rights-owners
have opted to go the tardy sequel route rather than mount a 90s
take on the same basic story as a straight remake (like the 1978
Comparing to another movie
Invasion of the Body Snatchers). The Rage Carrie 2, however,
goes the whole sequel hog. Amy Irving, sole survivor of the
original production, reprises her role, her 'where did my career
go?' bewilderment appropriate to her high-school princess cum
psychological cripple. Tiny snippets of Sissy Spacek are
Mentions actor
glimpsed in flashbacks, and while it's a touch shoddy that
Irving's Sue should remember Carrie's subjective fantasies, at
least continuity is respected in a visit to the still-ruined site of
the old school. In the book, telekinesis is passed down from
mother to daughter, but this jiggles the premise to introduce a
hitherto unknown sister of the definitively killed-off Carrie.
Analyses Characters
Talks Briefly about
the director
There are noteworthy changes in the characterisation. Rachel is
a tougher outcast than Carrie, tattooed and sharp. This plays
well during the long build-up that tries to feel like a teen movie
distantly influenced by Kids. But it undercuts the finale in
which Rachel has total control over her telekinetic powers (she
can even rewind videotapes) and is thus a malignantly vengeful
fury in contrast to the lost, desperate Carrie. Rafael Moreu's
script just scrambles the elements, taking all the plot points and
characters from De Palma and King and trotting them out again
in light disguise: the caring gym teacher becomes the caring
counsellor, the callous bitch becomes a callous stud, the strict
mother becomes neglectful foster folks, the nice girl who tries
to help becomes a nice guy, the prom becomes a post-game
party (with a considerable loss of iconic teenpic status) and
Sue's last-minute nightmare of Carrie's hand reaching up from
her grave is ineptly reprised as Jesse's vision of a fragmenting
ghostly Rachel.
For a project that could hardly be anything but a waste of
space, the film is fitfully engaging for at least two-thirds of its
running time. Aside from one minor exercise in post-Scream
jokiness, the standard teen stuff is enlivened by good
performances from the kids (the adults, mostly, are dreadful).
Katt Shea, who took over direction at the last minute from
Robert Mandel, strives to recreate some of the class and sex
issues of Poison Ivy, his most successful film. But The Rage
falls apart when it ought to go into overdrive during the
climactic holocaust. The more contrived gruesomeness (a spear
impales one jock to the door and also skewers Sue on the other
side, for example) tends to get laughs. That producer Paul
Monash, who handled the original, has a franchise in mind is
confirmed by the veiled suggestion that Ralph White, father of
Carrie and Rachel, might have other unknown daughters out
there.
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Talks about
storyline
Comparing to
another movie
Aimed at educated and experienced readers
Mainly positive review of movie
Review compares and mentions films with alot of older films (eg.
Invasion of the body snatchers) expecting the reader to know of
them or watched them.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/578
What Lies Beneath
USA 2000
Reviewed by Philip Strick
Date of release and where the movie is set
Reviewers Name
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise
twists.
Detailed Plot
Analysis
Her nerves on edge after a car crash a year ago, Claire Spencer
finds herself idle when her daughter, Caitlin, goes off to
college. Claire's husband, Dr Norman Spencer, a geneticist, is
loving but overworked, determined to better the achievements
of his late father. Alone in their lakeside house in Vermont,
Claire becomes certain that their neighbour, Warren Feur, has
murdered his wife, Mary. She is also uneasy about strange
happenings in the house and imagines glimpses of a phantom
woman.
At the suggestion of her psychiatrist and with the help of her
friend Jody, Claire attempts a seance. Shaken by its apparent
result, she rushes to Norman's campus laboratory where
Warren, one of the faculty tutors, is accompanied by Mary,
alive and well. At home, a press cutting hidden behind a picture
frame refers to a missing girl, Madison Elizabeth Frank.
Tracing Madison's mother, Claire visits the girl's room and
removes a memento, a braid of Madison's hair. With this and a
book on witchcraft for guidance she tries to contact the dead, a
process which 'transforms' her into Madison for long enough to
realise that Norman had an affair with her.
Norman admits his lapse and begs forgiveness. Claire later
finds a jewel-box in the lake containing Madison's pendant, and
under questioning Norman admits to hiding the girl's body after
her suicide. Claire insists he calls the police but he drugs her
into immobility and confesses he killed Madison to prevent her
ruining his life's work, as he must now kill Claire. Avoiding
being drowned in the bath, Claire crashes their car into the lake,
where Madison's enfolding corpse prevents Norman
resurfacing.
Talks about
background of
movie
Review
Given that the making of What Lies Beneath was reportedly
sandwiched between production schedules of another new
Expects reader to
know what this is
Expects reader to
know who this is
Robert Zemeckis project (Cast Away), the extent to which the
two completed films will be seen to complement each other
must await future measurement. In its own right, however,
there is no denying that What Lies Beneath is something of a
disappointment after the grander designs of Contact. Despite
the high-gloss players and lavishly tailored settings, the film
contrives to be both overdressed and undernourished, a
twilight-zone anecdote attenuated beyond its reasonable span.
Intended as a Hitchcockian suspense thriller (one of the few
genres not previously tackled by Zemeckis), it has blatant and
joltingly effective allegiances but remains ultimately
unconvincing.
Hitchcock's plots, while not averse to some divine intervention,
scorned the supernatural as a driving force. Zemeckis, director
of Death Becomes Her and episodes of the television series
Tales from the Crypt, has no such qualms. His audience primed, in fact, as much by Henri-Georges Clouzot as by
Hitchcock, thanks to the copious bathroom scenes - may insist
on working out a rational explanation for the film's spectral
assaults, but Zemeckis gleefully complies with the current
craze for being spooked by disguising his heroine's intuitive
imaginings (Claire is haunted by visions of her husband
Norman's dead mistress) as a story of revenge from beyond the
grave. Depending on our preference, the film just about holds
together as a case history of shared delusion, the ghosts only in
the minds of the neurotic wife and fickle husband. And our
scepticism is usefully prompted by the reminders of Rear
Window (1954) and Psycho (1960), although the tearing of the
shower curtain and Alan Silvestri's Herrmannesque soundtrack
are a bit much. It will not escape notice that the duplicitous
spouse is called Norman.
Short detailed
paragraph about
Writer and plot
Written by Clark Gregg, better known for his acting (The Usual
Suspects), What Lies Beneath craftily employs two habitual
Hitchcockian devices, the plot detour and the peculiar
bystander. Much of the film's first half is time-wasted by the
mystery of the neighbours whose violent dispute leads to the
removal of a corpse-sized parcel. This lively melodrama has no
bearing on the 'real' story except that, like the several
predicaments unfolding in the apartments of Rear Window, it
provides an uncanny parallel to the central relationship. Up to
the point at which the villain turns indestructible and we are
stuck with a gory collection of horror-film clichés, What Lies
Beneath is a gallery of eccentrics echoing the innumerable
rehearsals for marriage in Hitchcock's work. Oddly adrift, like
Claire's best friend Jody or Mrs Frank and her cat, these
troubled souls seem even to extend to Claire's enigmatic
psychiatrist and to her daughter's withdrawn room-mate.
Comparing to
another
movie
Directors History
Comparing to
another movie
Inadvertent spirits, there but not there, they embody the sorry
relics of countless lost partnerships.
Criticising the
Movie and
conclusion of
review
Such losses are a constant in Zemeckis' films: what really lies
beneath his flashy and ingenious surfaces has been a tide of
dysfunctional families, missing parents and deprived offspring.
Norman's problem, as it was for the hero of Back to the Future
and the heroine of Contact, is his departed father whose house
he now occupies and whose achievements he struggles to
transcend. The theme of mislaid and displaced children, central
to Forrest Gump and Back to the Future II, continues here in
the form of the wraith herself, an unnerving substitute for the
daughter who has assumed the independence of college life. At
the same time, the ghostly obsessive and her anguished
observer are the latest recruits to the Zemeckis army of 'driven'
women, pathetic in Forrest Gump, comical in Death Becomes
Her, deadly serious in Contact. Frequently linking his
characters' awakenings with a magical casket (the 'Flux
Capacitor' of Back to the Future now becomes a revelatory
jewel-box), much given to rolling his cast down flights of
stairs, and showing a Tarkovskian relish for soaking them amid
bursts of lightning, Zemeckis is having a grand time making his
audiences jump but seems intriguingly hell-bent for matters of
deeper concern.
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Review mainly Positive except for last paragraph
Written for an Educated reader
Review compares and mentions films with alot of Older films (eg..
Contact and Back to the future ) expecting the reader to know of
them or watched them.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/re
view/481
Ring
Japan 1997
Date of Release and where the movie is set
Reviewed by Mark Kermode
Reviewers Name
Synopsis
Detailed Plot
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise
twists.
Tokyo, 5 Sept 1997. High-school pupil Tomoko dies after
telling a friend that a week ago she watched a video, then got a
phone call saying she would perish seven days later. 13 Sept :
television reporter Reiko, mother to Yôichi and aunt to
Tomoko, travels to the cabin in Izu where Tomoko saw the
tape. Reiko watches the tape and then receives a phone call.
14 Sept: Reiko's ex-husband Ryûji watches the tape. 15 Sept:
Ryûji has a vision of Tomoko and discovers a voice on Reiko's
copy of the tape. 16 Sept: Ryûji recognises that the voice's
dialect belongs to the island of Oshima. Here, a psychic woman
named Shizuko threw herself into a volcano whose eruption she
had predicted 40 years ago. 17 Sept: Reiko takes her son Yôichi
to her father's house, where Yôichi watches the tape, allegedly
upon instructions from Tomoko. 18 Sept: Reiko learns of Dr
Ikuma whose ESP experiments on Shizuko ended in scandal.
19 Sept: having traced Shizuko's father, Reiko views a tape in
which Shizuko's daughter Sadako kills a man with her
thoughts. Reiko and Ryûji deduce that Dr Ikuma fathered
Sadako and took her following Shizuko's death.
20 Sept: at Izu, exactly a week after first watching the tape,
Reiko (with Ryûji's help) uncovers a well where Sadako's body
has lain since she was murdered by Ikuma. Believing the curse
to be lifted the pair return home. 21 Sept: Ryûji is killed by an
apparition of Sadako and Reiko realises that the curse can only
be broken if the viewer of the tape shows it to someone else
within seven days. To save Yôichi, she drives to her father's
house to show him the tape.
Review
[Editor's note: this review reveals one of the film's surprises.]
"Who did the story start with?" asks heroine Reiko midway
Reviews go in
detail about
movie, meaning
that this review
is written to
inform more
than advertise
through this riveting amalgam of modern urban myth and
ancient eastern legend, a Japanese answer to The Blair Witch
Project which sets a ghoulish leer of delight on the face of its
ever widening audience. "Stories like that don't start with
anyone," replies her ex-husband Ryûji. "People feel anxious
and rumours start flying. Or people start hoping that things will
turn out like this." From the off, Ring keeps its audience
guessing but, by the end, few could have predicted things
would turn out so hellishly well.
Based on a best-selling horror pot-boiler by Kôji Suzuki, Ring
became the highest-grossing horror film in Japanese history
when it was released in 1998, bringing to mind the success of
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez's off-beat low-budget
shocker in the US. Originally double-billed with its sequel,
Ring has become a cult in the East where dolls of Sadako - the
murderous child-ghost at the murky heart of Ring's narrative are reputed to be as popular as Freddy Krueger gloves in the
West. Such adulation is not undeserved. Even after the UK
releases of both Blair Witch and The Last Broadcast, Ring
remains compelling viewing, a stark treat which looks back to
the austere black and white rituals of Kaneto Shindo's
unsettling samurai film Onibaba (1964), and sideways to the
teen-slasher terrors of such films as Scream.
Comparing to other films
Talks about Director
and Cinematography
Expects you to know
who this is
Talks about the
music in the film
Director Hideo Nakata manages to strike a genuinely alarming
balance between the cultural depths of Japanese folklore and
the surface sheen of latter-day teen culture. With its video
curses, late-night television links and matter-of-life-or-death
phone calls, Ring has more than enough techno-friendly
trappings to ensnare the average channel surfer. But lurking at
the bottom of its well of intrigue is a timeless terror more
attuned to the mature sensibilities of an adult audience. And it
is this unique combination of old folk devils and contemporary
moral panics which gives Ring such a nerve-rattling edge.
Having served his apprenticeship at the Nikkatsu Corporation
(an exploitation house which nevertheless produced such avantgarde classics as Seijun Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter, 1966) Nakata
demonstrates a broad knowledge of the international horror
genre, winking his eye toward the viral screen imagery of
David Cronenberg's Videodrome, and lending his ear - or at
least that of Kinji Kawai (who scored the film) - to the atonal
clatterings of Krzysztof Penderecki (used to fine effect in The
Shining), and the synthesised wails of director Dario Argento's
music group Goblin. But his finest moments are entirely his
own; it is hard to imagine anyone else making such ghastly use
of a jerky, faceless human form during the apparitions of
Sadako, and the sequence in which her spirit literally crawls out
of the television set will scare the living hell out of you. No
amount of high-tech special effects could match the balletic
awfulness of this painfully simple sequence, which tops
Poltergeist in the creepy cathode-ray stakes.
Conclusion
Whether the US remake of Ring will have anything like the
same impact remains uncertain. Although Suzuki's story has
clear transatlantic potential, one is inclined to conclude that it is
the telling, rather than the content of the tale, that is allimportant. If the medium is indeed the message, then the
message may well be that certain terrors can only be seen
through the eyes of visionaries like Nakata.
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Written for educated readers (eg. Uses the word
‘Synopsis’ instead of ‘plot’
Refers to and mentions other movies and expects the
reader to know or have watched them