remake | BLOODCRYPT

Carrie: F

Yes, Chloe Moretz is a good actress. There. I got that out of the way. Now you go ahead and tell me what else this movie has going for it because I am at a motherfucking loss.

I have never seen a more pointless remake. This is the same exact movie from 1976 with only very superficial “updates” for a modern audience.

For example, the scene where Carrie gets her period in the locker room: Totally the same; they even throw tampons and do that cunty chant. One of the Plug It Up Girls uses a smart phone to capture the incident and posts it to Youtube. Other than that the scene is an awkward facsimile of the original. Why even remake it if all you are adding to it is a fucking iphone?

Maybe some viewers were all “Wow! So clever! Video! It’s like Carrie, but for our generation, bro!” If that sort of scene is all it takes to impress you, someone might as well remake The Shining and be sure to include a scene where Wendy loses cell phone service. Or how about a Jaws remake where they try to track the shark with GPS?

“Aw man, it’s like they are trying to stop that shark, but it’s like, set in present day, bro!”

The whole movie is like this. It’s almost a scene-by-scene reconstruction of the original film with a lame product-placement-feeling layer of the 21st century superimposed on top. The car still gets destroyed, but it is a 2013 Challenger. They dump pig’s blood on Carrie, but they play humiliating HD video clips on a projection screen behind her. The wardrobes are updated (fucking name-brand central) and they work cell phones into a few scenes.

At least they had Carrie conduct her telekinesis research at the library with actual books instead of having a montage of her Bing searches.

I’m not upset to see a movie resurrected in modern times(even though my gripes may make it sound that way), but the movie didn’t seem to have much of a point otherwise. That’s what pisses me off. Maybe I’m undermining the idea that the cruelty and alienation of adolescence holds up across generations, but a Carrie reboot was not an effective vehicle for this message. I get that that is what the filmmakers were probably going for, but I couldn’t help saying (out loud) “so fucking what?! I’ve already seen this movie!”

The acting was clunky. Tons of unnatural and forced dialogue from the teenage characters. You could tell some adults in LA wrote the screenplay. Julianne Moore was not creepy as Carrie’s mom, but I just think she is funny as a person, so maybe you will think she is scary when she is holding scissors and laugh-crying.

Day of the Dead (2008): C-

I have seen worse remakes and worse zombie flicks in general.

This one had the model premise of a sudden viral outbreak and a group of ragtag survivors banding together. They keep the idea of a domesticated zombie, but he is super-annoying and just makes “the most annoying sound in the world” from Dumb & Dumber for a long time.

Maybe this is the first time I have seen zombies devour one of their own in a zombie flick. That was new. Everything else is super-tired or lame. The other new thing they try in this movie is really fast zombies. You have seen slow zombies and you have seen fast zombies. Now there are really fast zombies who climb on the wall like Jeepers Creepers and when they run, they look like seizure victims with carp in their trousers.

There is some entertaining low-budget gore, but cardboard acting and a plot that could have been written by throwing darts at a flow chart keep this movie dead in the dirt.