The main ingredients -- the adolescent heroine's mystical, mind-over-matter powers, her mother's sadistic, religious zeal, and her classmates' brutal bullying -- never interlock with each other. The crazy mother especially, with her Salvation Army frock and her Pre-Raphaelite hairdo, seems to be several decades out of sync with these modern teenagers (the car culture of American Graffiti is duplicated down to the very same shots and the goldie-oldie on the radio). The girl's supernatural powers serve mainly as a deus ex machina, and are never made to seem any more mysterious or believable than the hocus-pocus in Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie. The best material is on the everyday horrors of high school. Nearly every scene featuring the tense, well-groomed, level-headed gym teacher, Betty Buckley, plays quite credibly. And Sissy Spacek, as the senior class pariah, achieves some affecting moments of shyness, clumsiness, and self-pity, independent of the zany storyline. Through it all -- the freckle-faced girl's brutalization at home and at school, the improbable prank played on her at the prom, and her Zeus-like flood-and-fire retaliation -- the movie is involved in overstatement. It's almost as if, by their exaggeration, the creators of this horror story doubted the truth of their thesis about the evil lurking in all God's children. Brian De Palma directs the thing with enormous technical proficiency and a very poor sense of emphasis. He makes little of the girl's discovery of her powers (she looks in the library card catalogue under the heading "Miracles," and locates a one-line definition of "Telekinesis"), he skims over the first showdown between mother and daughter, he mistimes the plot surprise just prior to the climactic holocaust, he mislays his imagination during the big destruction scene (a firehose snakes around, knocking people on their asses, as in a Chaplin comedy), and he gets his only measurable thrill, underhandedly, after the story proper has ended. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd