Opening frame to its closing moment, Brian De Palma's Carrie is one weird, weird movie. Startling with its marshmallow-porn opening sequence set in a high school girl's gym and carried all the way through its nightmarish finale the movie is rife with in-movie references. Replete as well with the broadest possible characters and the leanest of narrative elements it delivers a one-two horror punch of telekinetic kitsch. In short, the picture is a masterpiece of imitation and popcorn filmmaking.

Tagged with the invitation, "If You've Got A Taste For Terror... Take Carrie To The Prom," De Palma's movie was knowingly produced with a nod towards pulp horror elements like the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the fiction of Stephen King with his source novel of the same name. But it was also produced in the shadow of earlier commercial hits of the 1970s and was marketed with the warning, "If The Exorcist made you shudder, Carrie will make you scream."

Budgeted at $1.8 million the movie is nothing more than a coming-of-age story about Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), the cloistered daughter of a religious nut named Margaret (Piper Laurie). An outsider by definition, Carrie starts her first period following gym class and becomes the object of scorn for a popular rival and the school's resident bitch, Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen). Fortunately, she also earns the protection of her gym teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley), and the guilty conscience of one of her early tormentors in the guise of the lovely Sue Snell (Amy Irving).

When Sue conspires with her All-American boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) to make amends, Tommy responds by asking the bookish loner to the prom. Meanwhile Chris conspires with her doofus boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta) to turn Carrie into the laughing stock of the school.

Learning about her daughter's menstruation and subsequent streak of independence Margaret White is none too pleased, especially at the intercession of Miss Collins. Threatening not to let her little girl out of the house with anyone for fear of incipient sin, Carrie restrains her mother with telekinesis and emerges a happier person. It's a freeing moment and a transformative one for the strawberry blond heroine who goes from being a bookish mute and blossoms into a fatal beauty, seemingly overnight.

Tommy takes her to the prom and they're named king and queen after a wonderful evening of dancing and pleasant small talk. At the moment of their coronation, however, Chris and Billy drop a bucket of pig's blood on sweet, glowing Carrie thereby unleashing her supernatural rage on the gymnasium. Bedlam ensues with everyone dying save Sue and Carrie, the former just barely escaping with her life and the latter returning home to find her mother burning candles and acting strangely.

Washing off the blood, Carrie takes solace in her mother's arms although Margaret White's break from reality has caused her to move from being a religious zealot into being a murderess. As they pray together, asking for forgiveness, Margaret stabs Carrie who then retaliates with a telekinetic matricidal crucifixion and collapses their house leaving but one survivor in the story, Sue, who wakes up from an eerie nightmare some time later on, screaming.

Despite stylistic impulses directly borrowed from Hitchcock's various thrillers, including composition in depth to emphasize foreground objects, the use of slow motion to build performances and narrative tension and the unhinging effects of a moving camera that reveals more than any single character can know within the story, De Palma's picture is also deliberately hysterical. Not in a laugh out loud way but more like how every one of the film's emotional triggers is connected to shrieks on the soundtrack, the dissonant music of Pino Donaggio or extreme close-ups of Spacek as the harbinger of Carrie's telekinetic madness.

Of course the film is also a compendium of moments from the early careers of its collected movie personalities. Irving and Buckley make their big screen debuts while Spacek cements her position that has continued through the present day as a slightly off-center lead actress with disarmingly youthful features. Then there's Katt and Travolta, the former seemingly ideal for superstardom, though he later crashed as a TV star and straight-to-video actor, and the latter somewhat natural in his role as a pussy whipped boyfriend, though he clearly turned into a major film figure. Laurie also brings a rare screen appearance to the picture and nearly unhinges it with her depiction of a crazy mother but it's to the movie's subtext that it's hard to avoid making a few observations.

It's plain that Carrie is a potent allegory about female sexuality lifted from the pages of pop psychology, but one involving thoughts about a male inferiority complex when considering King as the story's author. Thus it's not just the story of a good girl gone bad due to unpleasant adolescent circumstances, therefore making it consistent with any of a number of other coming-of-age movies. Carrie is also about a good girl gone bad because she's so utterly different from her peer group, and not just for superficial reasons like fashion or height. She's different from everyone else and her exclusion pushes her to the point of taking psychopathic action.

In this capacity to commit violence, not just against her obvious and professed enemies like Chris and Billy but also against her erstwhile friends like Miss Collins, Carrie becomes a force of vengeance. She's the movie's embodiment of adolescent transgression, feminized action and strength but also of personal triumph over social limitation.

Responding to the catcalls and derisive laughter of her fellow prom-goers, several of whom voted her queen despite Chris and her rigging of the voting process, Carrie levels the field. She kills indiscriminately. With the fatal touch of justice the entire gymnasium of randy teenagers, in mass, becomes her threatening antagonist letting her respond with telekinesis just waiting in the wings to supply a cataclysmic finale.

Part horror movie and partly a stylish exercise in the melodramatic, Carrie finally becomes a revenge fantasy leading up to, and including, the primal urge to destroy all authority and censure, one's parents included. Carrie White survives her worst fears about being publicly ridiculed and ends up turning the tide on her would-be assailants. She kills them all and in this crucible of justice spinning away from her pig blood-covered fingertips she is an angel of death, but death with ample motivation.

Originally slotted to play the role of Chris that finally went to longtime De Palma collaborator, Nancy Allen, Spacek wasn't even considered for the lead part until her husband, Jack Fisk, talked the director into letting her audition for the part. Her resulting performance is spooky and went on to define an aspect of '70s cinematic kitsch, complete with overripe emotions and an unselfconscious performance with somewhat gratuitous nude sequences and freckle fetishism.

Let it not be said Sissy Spacek isn't a pretty woman. And let it not be said De Palma is anything but overt with his preoccupations when considering Bates High School as the setting in homage to Psycho or the utterly laughable concentration on female body parts, clothed and unclothed, throughout. Then there are odd moments like Tommy's tuxedo shopping montage, the dizzying camera shot of Tommy and Carrie dancing at the prom and the ending dream sequence with coal-eyed Sue lit with a dreamy gauze.

The resulting mix of performance, technical execution and cinema history converging in one popular film undeniably laid one of the keynotes of '70s cinema. That it remains entertaining today, though just barely and then often only as an historical record, demonstrates the reach of De Palma's first hit, King's first crossover onto the big screen and a popular willingness to accept horror movies as a potentially female-centered genre.

Seeing it rewards casual viewers along with movie enthusiasts who can offer an appreciation for silliness and mayhem when screening this imprint from 1976.