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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.

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