There are all kinds of ways to make fun of Katt Shea’s The Rage: Carrie 2. I’m going to skip over most of them. This is not necessarily a good movie, but it’s one I’ve always liked. If you want some energetic late ’90s high school Goth angst, an impressive final-act bloodbath, and some depressingly timeless social commentary, you might like it too, especially if you have a high tolerance for the ridiculous.

Rachel Lang (Emily Bergl) is an outsider, but she’s still having a better time than her predecessor Carrie White. Her fanatical mother was carted off to–I’m not kidding–Arkham Asylum after an eccentric attempt to exorcise the “demon” in her daughter, and Rachel has spent most of her life with her tuned-out foster parents. It’s not a great life, but Rachel, unlike Carrie, has a best friend: sweet fellow outcast Lisa (Mena Suvari). They have matching heart tattoos and a BFF motto; there’s nothing they won’t do in this long, long life of theirs! Smash-cut to a heartbroken, sexually humiliated Lisa doing a swan-dive off the school roof.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Rachel connects with Jesse (Jason London), The One Good Football Player, and the two begin a genuine romance that outrages Jesse’s self-appointed “real” girlfriend, cheerleader Tracy (Charlotte Ayanna). Rachel’s righteous anger at the football team bullies who are responsible for her friend’s death riles them up too. Of course, none of Rachel’s enemies know that she’s been repressing burgeoning telekinetic powers (and apparently an odd ability to make the world turn black-and-white at random emotionally intense murders, but that’s never plot-relevant). Everything is set into motion for a post-game party gone horribly wrong.

Here we see another difference between The Rage and Carrie. Most of Carrie’s bullies were casual and opportunistic, driven by momentary disgust or the in-group thrill of viciously driving out a scapegoat; Carrie invites the audience into Sue’s shoes, not just Carrie’s, and recognizes that “ordinary” people who don’t make a full-time job out of petty sadism can get caught up in cruelty and (sometimes exuberantly) conform to it.

There is very little impulsive or disorganized cruelty in The Rage. These kids have a system, and even outside of that, the larger system–the community and its politics–bolsters them. If the emotional and moral realism of Carrie is something we feel from the inside-out, this is something we can recognize from the outside-in: it’s made headlines, it’s been dissected, it’s been analyzed, it’s vile. The football players keep a record of the girls they have sex with, assigning a number of points to each girl so they can both score and score. One of them sleeps with sixteen-year-old Lisa, who starts off the movie so happy about her new boyfriend that she’s floating several inches off the ground–until he tells her she was just “a pump” to him. Her suicide starts off a haphazard investigation, mostly put in motion by guidance counselor Sue Snell (Amy Irving), who just does not have the best luck when it comes to making amends. It comes as no surprise when the effort to charge a football player with statutory rape dies in the water: see, he could implicate half the team, many of whom come from the town’s leading families, and that’s not what you want in an election year.

The official machinations of injustice aren’t the only ones going on here, though. Almost every high school student here is a 1999 Chris Hargensen, seething with preppy rage at a girl daring to rise above her station. Chris and Billy just had a rigged prom queen election and a couple buckets of pig’s blood; their sequel counterparts have a full-on A/V presentation. A few people at the prom were kind to Carrie, and absolutely everyone laughing at her when she was drenched in blood was a stress-driven hallucination, not reality. Here, they’re all gonna laugh at you for real. They’re all in on it. No one in the in-group, besides Jesse, ever even considers not being a horrific monster, not by the time the final act rolls around. (The one bit of villainous nuance comes early on, when it’s implied that the player who slept with Lisa may, game aside, have genuinely liked her, and that he only broke things off so brutally because his friends made it clear they didn’t find her desirable–and he, unlike Jesse, wasn’t willing to court any kind of social disapproval. But by the end of the movie, he’s congratulating himself on “splitting [Lisa] in half.”)

It’s all sociological rather than psychological or emotional–it’s entirely about criticizing the evil in others rather than recognizing it in yourself. That’s not my favorite kind of horror, but it’s legitimate, and the film does a good job leaning into how revolting and damaging this world is. I think it’s unfortunate that it makes Rachel’s eventual rampage much more simple in its catharsis than Carrie’s is–all gratification, no unease–but there’s plenty of horror to be milked from the nausea-inducing social and sexual humiliation of the party scene before Rachel gets going. Katt Shea and writer Rafael Moreu have a good eye for painful, exact details: it’s not enough that the party screens a video of Rachel and Jesse having sex, they have to hoot and holler about a possible pimple they can see on Rachel’s ass, and the sadism of that moment is art. There’s another good moment where we see how some of this is the kids aping the adults around them, as one of the bullying players is forced to bare his ass in front of the whole team so his coach can pretend to look between his legs for a tampon string. It’s not commented-on, it’s just there, another ugly detail of an ugly society, a possible precipitating incident lost in the shuffle because hey, we can’t all get telekinetic revenge on those who expose and wrong us.

There are other good touches as well. I really like Rachel talking to Jesse about her grief–how she used to see someone from behind and always feel like she knew it was Lisa, and sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t, but now it never will be, ever again. Bergl’s performance is very strong throughout, and it’s heartbreaking watching her let herself feel happy and at-ease when we know it’s about to get pointedly snatched away from her.

And then, of course, there’s the ultimate carnage. It starts off on a hilarious note, with Rachel’s tattoo coming alive, but soon we get fire, harpoon guns to the crotch, eyeglasses shattering into eyes, and more. For the most part, the movie looks much cheaper than it is, but this scene must have been where all the money went. It’s a whole slasher movie condensed into a few minutes, and it’s as deeply enjoyable as its last death is deeply stupid.

Ultimately, the attempts to explicitly connect this to Carrie are sloppy and poorly utilized, and the movie would be better off without them–keep it a sequel if you want, but leave out poor Sue Snell, whose plotline goes exactly nowhere. The dialogue can be painful. It is, all in all, less effective, less complex, and less memorable than the original. But it’s fun, and the ways it’s smart matter more than the ways it’s dumb. While it has plenty of shallow, superficial appeal, it invites and rewards deeper attention–and that makes it much better than it needs to be. It’s been maybe twenty years since I’ve seen this, but I greatly enjoyed the rewatch.

The Rage: Carrie 2 is streaming on Tubi and Kanopy.