10 Movies That Prove Pod People Run Hollywood

Here’s a remake so enamoured of the original that its screenwriter, Lawrence D Cohen, receives co-screenplay credit simply for having penned the earlier film. The other credited scribe is Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa who, because it’s a small world, also scripted the 2014 remake of The Town That Dreaded Sundown. And they say ideas are anathema in Hollywood.

In the lead, Chloe Grace Moretz does what she can with a shopworn character, but a sense of déjà vu hangs over her casting because she also played a vulnerable adolescent experiencing her first period in the Middleschool Date segment of the abysmal Movie 43 (2013). Julianne Moore plays her mother, taking over from Piper Laurie, whose naïve character lived in a world without Google, and was more credible for it. The advances in technology allow Carrie to wreak more havoc here, including a destructive finale that Brian De Palma could only have dreamed of, but all the changes to the original story are cosmetic.

The director is Kimberley Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), who seems like a natural fit for a story about a troubled teen who develops telekinetic powers, but the material is so familiar, the supporting cast so uninteresting and the approach so half-hearted that it’s all rather underwhelming. For a film whose plot hinges on a bloodbath, the results are sadly anemic.