As you’re most likely aware by now, another adaptation of Stephen King’s “Carrie” (his first published work, in point of fact) is set to hit theaters next week. The trailers look pretty good so far, and the cast has me very interested. Chloe Moretz continues to be a fascinating young talent, Julianne Moore is always a pleasure to see onscreen, and the underappreciated Judy Greer is also a plus. One little problem: I haven’t read the original story, nor have I seen the original film.

For the longest time, I expected to keep myself fresh and let the remake be my first exposure to the story. A newcomer’s perspective would be quite novel, after all, and I reasoned that it was the best way to judge how well the film stood on its own. Then again, the original film is such a classic that it’s safe to assume everyone’s already seen it, so bringing myself up to speed would probably be the better idea. So here we go.

Right off the bat, it’s obvious that the movie was made pretty much entirely by men. The opening credits sequence opens in a high school women’s locker room, with acres of gratuitous nudity on display. Never mind that the characters are all underage girls, of course. Even when the mousy and withdrawn Carrie (Sissy Spacek in one of her signature roles) starts showering, it looks like something right out of a softcore porno. Until the vaginal bleeding starts.

Carrie gets her first period, and all hints of eroticism go right down the drain. The following sequence is all about close-up shots, shouting mobs, and all-around havoc on the screen. It’s a very effective bait-and-switch that establishes a kind of psychological horror while making our protagonist instantly sympathetic. It’s an effective start, though all of Carrie’s classmates (the female ones, at least) are made to look like cartoonish monsters.

In fact, the whole film seems to have a problem with subtlety. Pretty much all of the characters are painted in broad strokes. The high school students (with one minor exception) are all assholes, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) is the sympathetic teacher, Principal Morton (Stefan Gierasch) is the total buffoon, Carrie’s mother (Margaret, played by Piper Laurie) is an abusive, completely irredeemable uber-religious nutjob, etc. And then there’s Carrie, so timid and afraid of everything around her that you’d think she was always trying to hide from the world in some dark corner.

Mercifully, there’s one character in this movie who seems to get some amount of depth. I refer to Sue Snell (Amy Irving), the one girl in Carrie’s class who seems to show some manner of regret for her part in Carrie’s hellish life. Yet Sue is ultimately quite ineffectual in the grand scheme of things, which is rather odd, considering that she turns out to be the last one standing. Factor in the ending (which was made from whole cloth for the movie, I understand), and I couldn’t really figure out what Sue’s place in all this was. It’s like the filmmakers wanted to put Sue in a morally gray area but had no idea how to actually pull that off.

The blunt approach is especially obvious with Carrie’s budding telekinetic powers. From the very outset, the film is always painfully clear about when Carrie’s abilities are being used. Sometimes the manipulated object is being shot in close-up, and sometimes the telekinetic push is accompanied by an honest-to-god “Psycho-style” violin screech. The approach is so in-your-face that it drains a lot of the suspense and wonder from these supernatural happenings. It also hurts the character’s development as a growing telepath, since we see that she’s a very powerful force from the first scene. Granted, she may not be able to control her powers, but it’s nonetheless very clear that she’s potentially dangerous from the word go.

The subpar editing also bears mentioning. There isn’t nearly as much padding here as in other films from the 1970s, but the pacing still feels rather wonky in spots. A key example comes just before the half-hour mark, in which Carrie’s library research is clumsily intercut with drawn-out shots of her classmates’ detention.

But of course, the main attraction is when Carrie goes haywire at the prom. And wow, is that sequence dated. First of all, the sequence relies heavily on split-screen effects that look awful in execution. I get that Brian DePalma wanted to show as much of the chaos as he could, but he picked a really clumsy way to do it. Moreover, the mayhem greatly involves heavy use of red lighting and a garden hose that flies around spraying everybody. Even by 1976 standards, I can’t imagine how that could be so scary.

Oh, and let’s not forget the auto wreck that caps the whole prom debacle. Carrie kills our main teenage antagonists in a car explosion that’s ruined by obnoxious editing and a “rollover” effect that looks completely ridiculous. The explosion itself is quite impressive though, I’ll grant that much.

So with all of that said, why do audiences keep coming back to this movie? Well, the performances are certainly memorable. Spacek does an especially good job of elevating her material and bringing some illusion of depth to the title character. With the rest of the cast, however, the fun is mostly in watching how much they can camp things up. Piper Laurie reigns supreme as the production’s queen scenery-chewer, though Nancy Allen is also quite unintentionally humorous to watch. There’s also a sort of fun in watching John Travolta before he was famous, here playing a young sort of proto-Danny Zuko. Similarly, some genre fans out there might appreciate seeing William Katt’s performance, right when he was starting his long and prolific career. Recognition is also due to P.J. Soles, who puts in a brief yet bubbly turn as yet another high school bitch.

What’s more, I can see shades of some very interesting symbolism at play. Blood is a recurring symbol, as is the color red, though both of these symbols stop just short of making a point. Religion and sin are also main factors, but that’s mostly because Margaret keeps rattling on about them. When the film’s religious statements are all coming from a monstrous and abusive lunatic, how the hell am I supposed to take them seriously?

Ultimately, I think that Carrie gets by due to Sissy Spacek’s performance, camp value, and nostalgia. The film isn’t all that scary and it doesn’t have anything particularly intelligent to say, but both counts are partly due to how dated the film is. And anyway, when the film is loaded with such paper-thin characters and the narrative is presented in such over-the-top fashion, how am I supposed to take it seriously as anything but an unintentional laugh riot?

If anyone out there thinks that Carrie is some pristine classic that can’t be touched, I’m afraid I must disagree. Modern cinematic storytelling — in movies and in TV — shows an increasing preference toward developing strong characters, and that could do this story all kinds of favors as a drama. Moreover, special effects technology and filmmaking theory have both come a long way in the past forty years. I’ve no doubt that a modern remake could deliver a far more spectacular prom catastrophe without resorting to such hokey editing.

…Or maybe the source text should never have been adapted in the first place. I’ve never read the source text, so I don’t know that for a fact, but it’s a possibility worth discussing nonetheless.