Editorials
Kurt Russell vs Ray Liotta: ‘Unlawful Entry’ Remains an Overlooked ’90s Thriller
In a world where superheroes, sequels, horror (thankfully) and anything IP related are king, it seems as though the risqué original thriller has gone by the wayside. Over the past ten years or so you’d be hard pressed to find anything other than The Invisible Man, You Should Have Left, Gerald’s Game, Gone Girl, or Knock, Knock that really fit the mold (albeit with some finagling) and each of those is either tied to popular literature or skews closer to the horror genre.
But the original thriller thrived in the 1990s. Also thriving during this beautiful time in Hollywood were action movies featuring two adversaries face to face on the poster and/or movie cover. Movies like Face/Off, Point Break, Demolition Man, Universal Soldier, and Broken Arrow. 1992’s Unlawful Entry combines both of these elements with two heaping sides of the stalker and slasher horror subgenres. Which is why it’s one of my favorite films to recommend to people all these years later.
In the film, average businessman-dude Michael Carr (Kurt Russell) and his wife Karen (Madeleine Stowe) are attacked in their home in the middle of the night. Michael and the intruder fight for a bit before he escapes and puts a kitchen knife to Karen’s throat. He escapes and dumps her in the pool on his way out but the two are shaken up pretty badly. The entire situation leaves them each feeling violated and Michael wondering if he’s able to keep his wife safe despite his valiant attempt to do just that.
The next day, cops Pete (Ray Liotta) and Roy (Roger E. Mosley) show up to take the report and a fresh out of Goodfellas Liotta does a hell of a job creeping the hell out of us the moment he lays eyes on Karen. Michael doesn’t see it but we do… and you don’t ever want someone looking at your significant other that way. Michael and Karen, being the naïve suburban couple they are, assume this cop only wants to help when he personally comes over to install their new security system.
Pete really plays up the bachelor cop angle in front of the couple and Michael tries to act tough and impress him when he talks about what he’d do if he were to get his hands on their assailant. Michael tells him in one of those great Kurt Russell moments that he’d “rip his fuckin’ heart out” and Pete laughs in his face and says, “you’re a really scary guy!”
The dynamic between the two is crystal clear. Pete doesn’t take him seriously in the slightest and it sets the tone for the rest of the film.
Pete then invites Michael on a ride along. Michael goes, just to avoid being rude and gets a taste of just how twisted the streets of Los Angeles can be at night. Eventually, in a moment alone, Pete walks into a dilapidated house and back out, dragging with him the very man who broke into their house and assaulted his wife. Excitement turns to panic for Michael when Pete hands him a night stick and tells him to do what he promised: ”rip his fucking heart out.” In this moment, Pete really lets the monster out of the cage and shows Michael and all of us know just how psychotic he really is. But he’s a cop and you get a sense of the uphill battle that’s about to take place when Michael has a hard time convincing even his own wife that Pete is bad news.
What follows next is a series of escalating events where Pete begins to obsess over Karen. He finds reasons to show up unannounced, uses his nice guy lonely cop routine to take her for a cup of coffee, and delivers a speech about “what it means to be a cop” to her elementary school students. Meanwhile, systematically tearing Michael’s life apart so he can get him out of the way.
We’ve seen this plot before in other movies but what makes it so different in Unlawful Entry are both the performances of Liotta and Russell and the tightness of the script. First off, Ray Liotta is scary as hell when he wants to be. The way that he turns, at the flip of a switch, from nice guy to absolute psycho is something to behold. You can tell he truly believes his psychotic thoughts and it is frightening. Liotta actually had me thinking at several moments here what an amazing Joker he would have played at this point in his career.
On the flip side, Kurt Russell once again manages to make his lack of ego one of his pure strengths as an actor. Steven Seagal could never. Russell is completely game to play an underdog way over his head who’s outmatched and out experienced in every way by a man who desperately wants to take his wife from him. Sure, Russell can play the over-the-top action hero as well as anyone and he’s proven such with roles like Tango and Cash or the Escape From New York/LA films. He’s also willing to strip all that down and play a normal everyday guy who’s scared shitless but maybe willing to do what it takes when the moment calls for it. It’s a talent he also brought to movies like Breakdown and Executive Decision but none more impressive than here. You can really put yourself in this guy’s shoes and it makes the moments where he overcomes the odds all the more heart pounding and exciting.
There’s very few things in the world I love more than a movie that comes down to a bare-knuckled fist fight between the hero and the villain. Especially when the hero is the massive underdog ala Bloodsport, Broken Arrow or Lethal Weapon. The lead up here raises the stakes significantly, and it uses horror to do so.
With Michael supposedly in jail after Pete frames him by planting drugs in his home, Pete shows up at their home to claim Karen. She comes downstairs thinking her friend is making dinner and there stands Pete cooking dinner in her home as though he belonged there. Just completely violating every space he moves through. Karen is forced to play along to keep from angering him. Even as she finds the body of her best friend stuffed in the closet shelf Michael Myers style complete with a Black Christmas bag still covering her face. When Karen finally breaks kayfabe and escapes after Pete tries to sleep with her, his switch flips and he begins to violently assault her.
If American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman were just a bit more subtle of a character who also happened to be a Police Officer, he’d be Officer Pete Davis. So, when Michael makes his heroic appearance and gets the chance to cathartically do what he could not earlier in the film by saving his wife, he’s doing so facing a fully tilted madman at the end of his rope.
It’s hard to figure out why Unlawful Entry seems so unheralded. Considering it received generally favorable reviews, was a box office success and oh yeah, stars Kurt Russell and Ray fuckin’ Liotta at their arguable peaks. Perhaps the problem was the film was sandwiched in between each actor’s most memorable roles? For Russell, Unlawful Entry released in the middle of an amazing run that included Tango & Cash, Backdraft and Tombstone. For Liotta, it just a few years removed from Goodfellas and Field of Dreams.
Or it’s possible the movie is looked at as just another run of the mill, racy thriller from the ’90s. I’d argue Unlawful Entry is much more than that. Not only does the film boast a great cast and have a fun mix of subgenres but it’s written tighter than most of its genre brethren. Part of what makes the story so frightening is that Michael makes all the right decisions throughout the film. He makes a stand early on and tells Pete to his face to his face to “fuck off” and leave them alone when being polite wasn’t getting through to him. He reports him to the department. When that doesn’t work he smartly reaches out to his partner (Roger E. Mosley), who he knows to be a good person. Michael is a smart son of a bitch who simply cannot overcome the pull this cop has over the city, no matter what he tries. When you, as an audience, spend your time trying unsuccessfully to solve this problem for him, instead of yelling at the characters to do the obvious, you can really begin to put yourself in his shoes and feel that helplessness for yourself. Sure, it’s frustrating to watch Karen be so naïve to this man’s charms but given the state of mind she’s in, you can sympathize to a point. Michael finally overcomes her doubt with a great line when he pleads to his wife, “What’s it going to take to convince you? Me in a body bag?!”
These are the moments that make the script by George Putnam, John Katchmer and Lewis Colick so impressive.
Unlawful Entry is a movie that may be a run of the mill ’90s thriller on the surface but explores so much more. It covers masculinity and relationships in the same way as a movie like Straw Dogs, with the entertainment level of a thriller like The Fugitive or The Bodyguard. There’s also a lot of very realistic points about how we as a society can be susceptible to the power those in certain professions hold over us if they choose to use them to do evil. There’s even some nice subtle Wes Craven-esque observations about classism and like a Christmas star on the tree, it’s all topped off with an unhinged Ray Liotta in top form, stalking and slashing his way through the movie. Unlawful Entry remains forever underrated.
Five decades ago, Stephen King published the story of a bullied girl with telekinetic powers and forever changed the world of horror.
Carrie follows a high school misfit who seeks revenge for a hideous prank by psychically destroying her senior prom. The name Carrie White has become synonymous with the concept of a formal dance thanks to a flawless adaptation from Brian De Palma. Now fifty years after the film’s release, Mike Flanagan is putting his own stamp on the troubling story.
Rather than a feature film, the writer/director will expand King’s relatively slim debut novel into an eight-episode miniseries for Amazon Prime set to premiere on October 7.
Flanagan is no stranger to the world of Stephen King. A long-time Constant Reader, he first made waves with his daring adaptation of Gerald’s Game (2017), a novel many fans considered un-filmable. His underrated Doctor Sleep merges the disparate plot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with King’s original source material, and his 2024 genre-bending tearjerker The Life of Chuck faithfully executes one of the author’s most metaphysical novellas.
He’s currently mired in pre-production for an expansive adaptation of The Dark Tower series, keystone to King’s connected universe, and Warner Bros. recently announced that Flanagan will helm a new version of The Mist, King’s 1980 novella which sees a small Maine town overrun by otherworldly monsters.
Considering the vast array of the author’s previously unadapted material, an obvious question arises. Why reimagine Carrie in 2026? Noting the timeless nature of the content, Flanagan expressed his desire to bring the story of a bullied girl into modern times, mirroring his approach to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He explained, “The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.”
His miniseries will maintain the novel’s bloody bookends while delivering “big surprises” along the way.
A New Prom Night Nightmare
The roughly 60-second teaser introduces Summer H. Howell as Carrie White just before the moment of catastrophe. Standing in a prom dress, she smiles at her applauding classmates with an ominous crown perched upon her head. Moments later, Carrie unleashes a rage-filled scream into the night air while promgoers rush for the exit doors. But careful examination of this scene shows Carrie wearing a different, albeit dirty dress as she seems to telekinetically punish her peers.
In an exclusive first look with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan explains that in his version of the story, “the events of that prom are going to be completely different.” An open trunk emitting a crimson glow does hint at the pig’s blood dumped on Carrie’s head, but it’s likely Flanagan’s formal dance will be a different kind of horror altogether. Despite these changes, the series may end with the widespread destruction outlined in the source material. Unlike any previous adaptations, King’s novel ends with the near-total destruction of Chamberlain, Maine. A flaming street in Flanagan’s trailer promises similar carnage no matter what prank sparks Carrie’s deadly revenge.
The Monstrous Addition of Social Media
On the opposite end of this fiery conclusion is an extreme act of bullying that brings together the story’s main cast. King’s novel begins as Carrie gets her first period while showering in the girls’ locker room. Completely unaware of the concept of menstruation, the sheltered girl thinks she’s bleeding to death. Her classmates respond with vitriolic rage. Led by ultra-mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), they mock the terrified teen while pelting her with tampons. Glimpses of this disturbing event reveal that Flanagan has excised the scene’s nudity while adding a seismic update. As Carrie sobs in the shower stall, Chris and her friends film the breakdown with their phones.
Other scenes note the presence of social media, bringing King’s fifty-year-old story into the digital age.
Flanagan’s adaptation promises to explore the destructive power of social media, an often invisible entity with a potential for harm rivaling Carrie’s own powers. While King’s tormented heroine suffers in front of a small group of girls, Flanagan’s version of the incident will likely become a viral video, potentially circling the globe on social media. Similar to Katt Shea’s criminally underrated The Rage: Carrie 2, which includes elements of revenge porn exploitation, Flanagan’s modern retelling will distinguish itself by exploring the nebulous cruelty of online bullying, a force ten times more powerful than the irl pranks King first envisioned.
A Completely Reimagined White Family
In addition to modernizing these canon events, Flanagan hints at updates to Carrie’s oppressive upbringing at the hands of her mother, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan). Dead before the novel begins, we never meet Carrie’s domineering father Ralph, known to carry a bible alongside his gun. Flanagan’s White household will be an altogether different beast. In his version of the story, Carrie and her mother have been hidden away in the unassuming home, forced out of hiding by Ralph’s unexpected death. Perhaps we will finally meet this elusive man whose shadow hangs over his wife and child. Considering the White family’s fundamentalist lifestyle, this reimagining hints at tradwife culture and a home ruled by staunch patriarchal control.
Whereas King’s Carrie has been tormented by her classmates since Kindergarten, Flanagan’s Carrie will be a wide-eyed newcomer to public school, eager to make friends and engage with her peers. We glimpse Carrie cozying up to Chris and the equally popular Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) as she navigates a new social scene. Of course, we know this kindness is part of an elaborate plot designed to lull Carrie into a false sense of camaraderie, setting up an atrocious act of public humiliation. These brief moments of feigned compassion put Sue’s own complicity into question. Will Flanagan’s version of the character find the courage to defend Carrie from vicious bullies or will she succumb to peer pressure and join in the mob mentality?
Perhaps the biggest deviation from King’s original text is the relationship between Carrie and her mother. King’s Margaret White is a horrifically abusive religious zealot whose worldview has been hardened by internalized misogyny. She shames Carrie for menstruating, locks her in a closet to “pray,” and regrets not killing her child in infancy. She’s also responsible for Carrie’s social ostracization. Known to berate her neighbors for their “sins,” Margaret forces her daughter to live by an extreme code of conduct and disallows any potential friends lest they corrupt the girl with their worldly ways.
Flanagan’s version of the character is perhaps just as much a victim as Carrie herself. Also trapped inside her home, his Margaret is overly vigilant, her own trauma manifesting as strict control. Describing a more sympathetic depiction of the iconic villain, Flanagan explains, “Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world … [She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia.”
Despite this potential softening, Sloyan’s Margaret may still have a sharp edge. Though she has appeared in many Flanagan projects, from Hush (2016) to The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), she is best known for her role as the abhorrent Bev Keane in the poignant saga Midnight Mass (2021). Perhaps inspired by King’s Margaret White, Bev is pious and sadistic, willing to punish anyone who does not adhere to her warped approximation of Catholicism.
Flanagan specifically wrote Margaret with Sloyan in mind, likely remembering the actress’s eerie ability to create deceptive empathy and shift our allegiances on a dime.
Expanding Stephen King’s Telekinetic Universe
While most of King’s story deals with an unthinkable prom night in Chamberlain, Maine, large sections of the semi-epistolary novel see experts debating the nature of telekinesis. Do Carrie’s frightening abilities represent a new phase in human evolution or is the prom night carnage merely a fluke? King settles the debate with a shocking denouement in which a young mother recounts her infant daughter’s ability to dangle her crib toys in midair. We’re left to wonder if she will become another tormented girl who surprises the world with metaphysical strength.
Flanagan plans to build out this brief scene while amplifying themes of female empowerment. After introducing our main cast of characters, episode two will open with an unrelated story in which we meet another girl with the TK gene. Each subsequent chapter will expand this world, building out a roster of telekinetic young women. Considering King’s fondness for stories about powerful kids, often described as possessing “the shining,” Constant Readers will no doubt have their eyes peeled for various Easter Eggs nodding to the author’s vast catalogue.
Giving Carrie Her Own Voice
Perhaps the most striking distinction in Flanagan’s new trailer is the extent to which we hear Carrie’s voice. The sneak peek is fully narrated by the titular prom queen as she demands accountability. “I want to know why,” she explains while detailing Chris’ elaborate plan. Aside from the aforementioned coda, King’s book essentially ends with the aftermath of the prom night tragedy, leaving little time for Carrie to reflect. His shifting narrative does bring the reader into her fragile mind, though not before she’s been cowed by relentless cruelty. We watch Carrie sink into bloodthirsty revenge, but never hear a considered desire for justice or repair.
Flanagan’s original monologue allows Carrie to voice her pain and mourn the life she could have had. We’re also treated to a mug shot-style photo of Chris with a bruised and bandaged face, implying that the mean girl will have to answer for her senseless sadism.
Flanagan is known for filling his series adaptations with heartwrenching speeches that cut to the heart of his thematic intentions, and this teaser seems to follow suit. After years of fans, critics, and scholars analyzing Carrie’s pain, perhaps his modern retelling will offer the titular anti-hero a chance to finally speak for herself.
You must be logged in to post a comment.