10 Movies Released Way Too Late To Make Sense

Released 23 years after Brian De Palma’s classic 1976 Stephen King adaptation, The Rage: Carrie 2 showcases an identical plot to the original movie about an alienated telekinetic teenager with a mentally unstable mother snapping and massacring her peers.

Not only that, but the teen in question, Rachel Lang, is revealed to be Carrie’s half-sister! It seems that anime-style brain fu mayhem is hereditary.

Thing is, Carrie is a tragedy: a story about an isolated, abused kid who wreaks a terrifying revenge on her thoughtless peers and teachers. That wasn’t how teen slashers in the nineties worked, however.

The Rage arrived in the post-Scream slasher milieu, when audiences expected the teenage cast to be murdered in increasingly gory and inventive ways and the hero to be a resilient, powerful Final Girl - so it has its cake and eats it, positioning Rachel as both the Final Girl and the spree killer.

Rachel doesn’t enter a fugue state like her sister did: she chooses to stalk and execute her classmates in various imaginative, vicious scenarios, enjoying every minute - and the film wants us to enjoy it too, given how long it spends setting these kids up as sociopathic little monsters.

Had The Rage arrived in the late seventies or even the early eighties, it might have been more thematically similar to the original, rather than slavishly photocopying the premise. It might even have been possible to entice Sissy Spacek back into the role that made her famous.

It would certainly have made the ‘Carrie 2’ subtitle make more sense - since there’s no one by that name in The Rage.