"A VERY 'CARRIE' CHRISTMAS" CAMPS IT UP AT MUSIC BOX DEC 4
Piper Laurie will appear at Camp Midnight's "A Very 'Carrie' Christmas" event at Chicago's Music Box Theatre on Sunday, Decmber 4th. Laurie will participate in a Q&A following a screening of Brian De Palma's Carrie. But this will not be an average screening of Carrie. For starters, this is a show that was supposed to happen October 9, as a Halloween-themed event. For some reason, the show had been postponed, and now that it is happening in December, it has been changed, oddly, to be a Christmas-themed event. A portion of the proceeds from ticket sales will benefit Hell in a Handbag Productions, Inc., the theatre company that put on SCARRIE The Musical in 2005 (a revival of a show from 1998), an unauthorized spoof of the De Palma film and the 1988 Broadway musical version of Carrie that featured an all-male cast.So that gives one an idea of what to expect when Camp Midnight presents its "Interactive Audience Screening (complete with screening guide) and hellacious, hilarious commentary from your Camp Midnight hosts Dick O’Day and Hell in a Handbag’s David Cerda." The pre-show will feature a Carrie character parade contest with prizes for the winners (so "get out your prom dresses, buckets of blood and Bibles!"), and a sing-along at the Music Box organ. Laurie's memoir, Learning To Live Out Loud, will also be on sale at the event. The event begins with the pre-show at 2pm. Tickets are $12 in advance, and $15 the day of the show.
IS 'CARRIE' THE RIGHT CHOICE FOR A CAMP FILM EVENT?
The Chicagoist's Eric Hehr asks, "Is Carrie really the right choice for a camp film event? Does an Oscar nominated film that has become a staple of its genre deserve to be reduced down to the status of a B-movie and exploited for cheap laughs by comedic commentary?" Hehr continues:
Granted, aspects of Carrie have not aged well (mainly Travolta’s hair), and the horror genre is exceedingly fickle to begin with. However, we’re not talking about Killer Clowns From Outer Space or Motel Hell here. We’re talking about one of the few horror films nominated for Academy Awards (Spacek and Laurie received nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively). Carrie garnished an immense amount of positive reviews when it was released, grossing more than 18 times its budget ($33.8 million) and being hailed as one of the best films of 1976.
Chicago’s own Roger Ebert described the film as “an absolutely spellbinding horror film” and “an observant human portrait.” In 1978, Stephen Farber of the New West Magazine prophetically claimed that Carrie was “a horror classic, and years from now it will still be written and argued about, and it will still be scaring the daylights out of new generations of moviegoers." Director and self-proclaimed film geek, Quentin Tarantino, placed Carrie at #8 on his “Favorite Films Ever Made” list, and author Stephen King considers Carrie to be the best cinematic adaptations of all his novels. Carrie has also placed incredibly high on many other cinematic lists, including Empires Magazine "The 500 Greatest Movies of all Time" (#86), Entertainment Weekly’s "50 Best High School Movies" (#15), Bravo’s "The 100 Scariest Movie Moments" (#8), and the American Film Institutes "100 Greatest Cinema Thrills" (#46).
Hehr makes some great points, all of which I agree with, yet the idea of Laurie being present at such an event seems an appropriate irony. Laurie writes in her memoir that she originally connected to the Carrie screenplay by reading it as comedy. Viewing the film camped up with what Hehr calls "Mystery Science Theater 3000-esque commentary" should make for a very interesting Q&A with Laurie afterward.
Updated: Sunday, November 20, 2011 9:01 AM CST
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