Raising Cain (1992)

Brian De Palma should never be left to his own devices. Working alongside a creative support team, the talented director still manages to borrow from every manual in the book, yet his films are usually entertaining. Left to himself, as he is here, the results become a torpid series of sticky hijinks--a grab-bag of ideas taken not just from De Palma's heroes, but blatant steals from his own pictures! John Lithgow has been preconditioned to give a bravura actor's turn as a child psychologist whose personality has been 'split' by his nefarious mad-doctor father; when Lithgow spies his unsatisfied wife having an affair with a former flame, he goes off the deep end, resulting in a series of incoherent violent attacks aided by a trouble-making twin brother who doesn't really exist. Cinematographer Stephen H. Burum does some interesting things with his camera, and yet the art direction lets him down (the colors congeal and the film ends up looking chintzy, a problem Burum had earlier on "Body Double", also a De Palma film). Lithgow cackles, acts the hipster, dresses in drag, the works. However, all these fancy tricks--and De Palma's silly scare theatrics--cannot save the picture from doing a fast fade. *1/2 from ****

The great DePalma is a wondrous god of suspense, only with this one, he's falling very short it it, throwing in the usual DePalma tricks. You'll spot these, especially if you've seen seen Body Double, where he's rounded up a couple of his Scarface favs, for this, great actor, Henry, one, especially wasted here, playing the good guy this time, as a cop, who honestly looks like he's rather be somewhere else. I for one don't blame him. Fantastic Lithgow, plays a father, who's taken way too much interested in his child, and "No" he's not a pedophile. He suffers from Split Personality, where he's alto ego, a cocky, tougher, gruff bad guy, his adviser, who I didn't particularly like, is the one pulling the strings. There are a couple of others, nearly all, you won't meet anyhow. His conditioned is only worsened when his wife, (Davidovich) is messing around, with younger hottie (Bauer) which sets him on a path of murder and setting Bauer up. What amazed me here, was there was no real surprises, where Lithgow's great performance, and Sternhagen's as an old criminal psychologist, these two deserved much better material. This is a very dreary and sleepy thriller where the sunny color format here, suited it to a tee. The last imaginary image with Lithgow donning a women's wig, kind of owe's it to us. Some De Palma fans will quite disappointed with this one. Like it, just for the actors.

Jenny Nix (Lolita Davidovich), wife of eminent child psychologist Carter Nix (John Lithgow), becomes increasingly concerned about her husband's seemingly obsessive concern over the upbringing of their daughter (Amanda Pombo).This is not De Palma's strongest film and is more than a little strange and far-fetched. We do have just a bit of voyeurism, which seems necessary to make this part of the De Palma oeuvre. But seriously, this whole film is like a 90-minute audition tape for John Lithgow, showing off his range of characters and emotions.Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly summed it up nicely when he wrote, "Is Raising Cain a good movie? No way. You could almost say it's intentionally bad — a gleeful piece of jerry-built schlock. Yet De Palma's naughty-boy gamesmanship has a perverse fascination, even when it doesn't work (which is most of the time)."

Carter Nix seems to be a devoted husband and father, but behind this facade lurks a shady past and some decidedly odd relations. When Carter's twisted brother Cain shows up and some local children go missing, can the police figure out what's going on in time ?Brian DePalma's best films are just so deliciously twisted, and in my view this is one of his very best. There are at least five fantastic aaaaahhhhh moments in it; the comatose wife awaking from her slumber at the wrong moment, Carter abruptly smothering Jenny with the pillow, the shocking twist on the old car-in-the-swamp Psycho moment, Jenny's sudden appearance on the baby monitor, Margot headbutting Dr Waldheim. All of these are beautifully, lovingly stylised, but the whole movie is just full of fantastic sequences, culminating in the terrific showdown at the motel. It also has a completely outstanding four-minute shot in the middle walking through the cop-shop, where Sternhagen ploughs through a ton of back-story, hits about a thousand marks (including some intentionally wrong ones) and emotes like there's no tomorrow. If ever you hear some phony-baloney actor type spouting off about have to struggle to find their character, show them this scene - Sternhagen is wild, funny, gripping, irascible, scared, intriguing and intense, all at the same time. Better yet, Lithgow is equally sensational, playing five characters with terrific abandon, weedy one moment, terrifying the next. Okay, so DePalma may have trodden this ground before (Sisters, Dressed To Kill, Body Double), but nobody does these crazy, sexy, twisty-turny thrillers as well as he does, and the cinematic power of these incredible set-pieces is just astonishing. Here's a movie where not a moment is wasted, where every shot is both artfully composed and intrinsically important, where every nuance the actors can provide contributes to the mood and the shocks. It's simply fantastic from start to finish. With a terrific score by Pino Donaggio (the music makes me scream every time) and fabulous photography throughout from Stephen H. Burum, this is a masterclass is technical filmmaking. Produce by Gale Anne Hurd (of Terminator fame) and brilliantly written and directed by DePalma, this is a great, gleeful, creepy, exciting, shocking, fantastically well-executed thriller.