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26 out of 30 people found the following review useful: Sisters meets Scream meets Lost Highway meets god knows what, 1 March 2001 Author: David Sticher (das315@nyu.edu)
Raising Cain is an awesomely baffling set of pomo hijinks care of the man De Palma. I can't blame the hordes of people who hate this movie for its nastiness and incoherency, but those are the reasons I love it so much. It's a total parody/homage/celebration of the kind of razor-inspired fun De Palma spent much of his career perfecting, with the fun (and intentionally self-destructive) gimmick of presenting the movie more or less from Carter's point of view. With this, the movie trades conventional thrills, chills, and spills for a sneakier sort of fun. Instead of putting together the sort of hallucinatory bloodbath De Palma specialized in, he takes it apart. It's like he took all of his box-office successes, threw them in a blender, and kneaded the mixture into an extended nightmare sequence of half-remembered horrors, unreliable visual intake, and malformed cliches.If you try to take it as a straight thriller, it'll never work. It's a thriller plot turned into a horror flick, where instead of being the brave wife protecting people from her deranged husband, we're the deranged husband, not sure where we are or who we are, doing terrible things we don't quite understand, in a dreamworld constructed entirely of cliches and stock terrors. Scream would take the parody aspect into firmer territory and Lost Highway would take the insane protagonist aspect into firmer territory as well, and both of those films worked very well, but Raising Cain gets the ultimate thumbs-up from me for being constructed much like my own nightmares and for genuinely surprising me from time to time, not to mention for creating a feeling of urgency and sympathy for Carter.If you're into really oddball flicks, give Raising Cain a chance.
17 out of 22 people found the following review useful: Underrated, 4 December 2005 Author: José Luis Rivera Mendoza (jluis1984) from Mexico
The Multiple personality disorder has been subject of stories ever since Stevenson's famous novel "The strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Here, in "Raising Cain", director Brian De Palma shows everything he learned from studying Hitchcock and gives us a good story of suspense that although flawed, it is very enjoyable and gives the chance to shine to the underrated actor John Lithgow.Lithgow stars as Dr. Carter Nix, a brilliant psychologist that is spending a year at home in order to care for his little daughter. Jenny(Lolita Davidovich), his wife, is concerned that he is becoming obsessed with it, and her problems increases when she finds Jack Dante(Steven Bauer), an old lover who is interested in continue their affair. Little she knows that not only she'll have to face his husband Carter, but also his other personality, the evil Cain.Many reviews have complained that there is never a mystery that Carter and Cain are the same person. Well, that is because it is never intended to be a mystery. This is a suspense movie. As Alfred Hitchcock used to say(and no doubt that De Palma knows it), suspense is in the fact that the audience knows more than the characters. We know that Cain can appear at any time, and how the characters react to him is what keeps us thrilled.John Lithgow truly shines as the troubled Carter/Cain, in a role that brings back memories of his superb performance in "The Twilight Zone". Sadly for the movie, the rest of the actors give awful performances, Davidovich and Bauer have zero chemistry on screen, and almost no charm, so since their characters do not have redeeming qualities, one ends up wanting them to be killed by Cain.One big exception is Frances Sternhagen, who in her little screen time steals the show. Watch her in an amazing sequence as her character, a retired psychologist, explains the mental disorder to the detectives. That sequence is typical De Palma's perfection and Sternhagen makes the most of it.The script is for the most part OK, and so is the directing. Not De Palma's best, but certainly satisfying; his obsession with Hitchcock's suspense is notorious, but still he manages to give the movie his own style and while this do not save completely the movie, will be appreciated by those who enjoyed "Dressed to Kill" or "Sisters".To summarize, it is a better than average movie with superb performances by John Lithgow and Frances Sternhagen. Don't watch it with high expectations and you'll be satisfied.7/10
15 out of 20 people found the following review useful: De Palma Still Impresses, 29 July 1999 Author: Michael Neel from Houston, Texas
Despite the fact that he wrote a rather unintelligent script for his 1992 effort, director Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain" is still fast, funny, and, occasionally, very scary.In order not to reveal too much and spoil this wild little roller coaster ride, all I will say is that John Lithgow plays or at least speaks for five very different roles(!)De Palma isn't at his all-time best, but Lithgow proves that he is one of the great character actors of our time. Rated R. 95 minutes. 6 out of 10.
12 out of 17 people found the following review useful: *** 1/2 out of ****, 1 December 2002 Author: kyle_c from United States
De Palma's tongue-in-cheek twist on his own thriller formula works mainly as an inside joke for his fans - if you're looking for a standard formulaic suspense thriller, watch something else. Lithgow puts on a show with several superbly over-the-top performances. Some parts are scary, some suspenseful, and some hilarious, although they all have the mark of a virtuoso filmmaker - and they succeed because he doesn't take them seriously for a second. For De Palma fans, they don't get any more entertaining than this. However, non-fans might not get it.
5 out of 5 people found the following review useful: The silliest film ever made...?, 6 February 2002 Author: SteSykes from UK
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Possibly the most entertainingly sill film I've ever seen...***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***Raising Cain is almost like a parody of a De Palma film in some places, with the extravagant camera moves and blatant Hitchcock rip-offs, but I mean that in a good way. The film was often entertaining, the performances were generally OK (except for John Lithgow, who was as enjoyably over-the-top as ever) and even though it's made patently obvious from the very beginning that the main two characters Lithgow is playing are actually the same, the ending did come as a bit of a surprise. It's sometimes scary, sometimes funny, and often laughably absurd, but still highly watchable.Raising Cain is certainly not classic De Palma, clearly not up to the standards of Carrie, Dressed to Kill or Blow Out, but it is a very entertaining film all the same, and more proof that he should be making more of the typical De Palma films and less of the Hollywood guff. 8/10
6 out of 7 people found the following review useful: not as bad as it could be!, 30 January 2001 Author: Chancery_Stone from Scotland
Yes, it's bad for the man who made Carrie, but it's not as bad as it might be. A lot of it is tongue-in-cheek (witness the long tracking shot of the pet psychologist explaining split personalities) and it has some terrific bizarre moments, not least the scariest drowning-in-a-car scene in film history. It's a very weird movie and John Lithgow gives a great camp performance in it. I don't know if Brian set out to make a schlocky trash movie but that's what he did, and as such, it's fun. Watch it and see.
4 out of 4 people found the following review useful: never saw that coming, 27 April 2006 Author: kirk_bones from United Kingdom
I am not really a big Brian De Palma fan and i only had this on on in the background while keeping only half an eye on it but by the end was actually gripped by it and giving it all my attention. John Lithgow plays Dr Carter Nix who as a child was a psychological experiment for his warped father and this led to him developing multi-personality disorder,which included his father and the evil Cain. Now I only remember John Lithgow from the excellent out of this world comedy "Third Rock from the sun" and didn't really think he could do the multiple personality thing but I was pleasantly surprised and let me tell you that his portrayal of the evil Cains actually made my skin crawl. If you watch this film you need to keep a real eye on it as sometimes the personality switches come thick and fast and this film has a lot of twists and turns. You know there will a twist at the end but when it happened i thought,"wow ,now i never saw that coming" This is a very good psychological thriller and i give it a solid 8/10
5 out of 6 people found the following review useful: Here We Are, On Familiar Ground, 16 June 2006 Author: nycritic
Brian de Palma was once a great director who could do magic with his keen sense of suspense that paid a heavy homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Sergei Eisenstein. However, he tried to sever himself from his patent themes of choice and tackled other genres. While he excelled with his crime drama THE UNTOUCHABLES, he failed miserably with THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES.So by 1992 he decided (like most directors of a known style going through a bad patch) to go back to what he was known for. One problem, though. Assuming the role of screenwriter became his big misstep because as much as the idea works on paper, his dialog almost ruins the movie. It's the same thing that affected DRESSED TO KILL in which Nancy Allen was given some horrendous lines to say even when that film is a fantastic exercise in suspense and a correct reconstruction of a well-known story -- that of PSYCHO.However, de Palma creates a masterful dream-like world not that different thematically from the worlds of Luis Bunuel and his bourgeois, caught in the middle of their own frenzied dreams which are harbingers of nightmares, waking up to find they may still be in the middle of something not quite real. The story opens up layers upon layers of mystique and mystery and reveals information only in fits and spurts, which leaves us in a state of wondering what the hell are we watching at times.Indeed, it may take one more view to get the impenetrable mess that RAISING CAIN is, and this is due to the fact that so many of Carter's personalities come forth like an unseen cast operating only under John Lithgow's chameleon-like persona. In showing the two characters battling for the upper hand by placing Lithgow being a tree, for example -- a technique Peter Jackson would use for scenes in which Gollum and Smeagol shared their twisted, tragic banter about the wretched Ring in his LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS -- he has one of the best moments of duplicity ever seen on screen, and one that doesn't need split screens or special effects to be potent.But interesting as well is how another character is introduced, also under the persona of Lithgow. Margo, a kind woman, is only described by Lithgow's own words as being one "who looks after the children." I find it interesting that for Carter to be set free he has to let this female personality come forth and lead him to sure escape. As to whether she will remain as a dominant personality when she appears in the final reel remains a mystery but like Bunuel films, it's there, unexplained, shown mainly for a shock tactic a la UN CHIEN ANDALOU, but in a less threatening way.RAISING CAIN is a pretty slick movie that should be seen at least twice. There is so much happening with its plot, and so much interpretations that can be given to the dreams that blend in with the reality which in itself may be a dream that it may well be one of his better films, underrated because of the fracas of BONFIRE. It's intoxicating, and a Brian de Palma movie, this is it, hands-down. Every scene is a hoot to watch: it's as if the director had a huge bag of tricks that were part of his style and he had decided to let them all out in a flood of images and great sequences. And this is not something directors of a certain vision can say they do. I have to say I loved every homage and element thrown in. The dream within a dream sequence, Dr. Waldheim's (Frances Sternhagen) explanation that follows her throughout a winding set of hallways before having the camera zoom in on a victims horrified face, Carter's wife Jenny's (Lolita Davidovich) sudden awakening inside a car that is sinking into a swamp (another PSYCHO link) and the final showdown happening at several levels and in slow motion. If anyone can do high suspense today, it's de Palma.
3 out of 3 people found the following review useful: Good, dark, twisting little thriller, 6 March 2001 Author: Flora-9 (flora4079@yahoo.com) from Hertford, England
After reading the reviews here I felt the need to defend this film. OK so it's not the best film in the world but what it is, is a good, dark twisting little thriller.John Lithgow as Carter, Cain, Josh etc. is great and convincing in every role that he plays, as are the supporting players. The film is shocking, funny and sad.POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!Shocking is Jack's dying wife movements being reflected on the TV, funny is the character of Dr Waldheim and sad is the abuse inflicted on Carter by his dad.END OF SPOILERSIf you go into the film expecting too much then you may well be disappointed but if you have no expectations and love black comedy then this film is for you. And compared with DePalma's most recent films (Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars) this film is a masterpiece, although obviously nowhere as good as Carrie.
3 out of 3 people found the following review useful: I Don't Get The Fuss!, 3 September 2000 Author: alimabean from MD
The first several minutes of this movie may seem confusing, but by the end (especially after a second viewing) it comes together quite nicely. This seems to be one of those either love it or hate it movies. I happen to think it's great. There are several scenes that use imagery that stays with you.The acting is above par and the direction made me a DePalma fan (until Mission to Mars, that is). The movie is fairly accurate as far as the disorder goes which makes it that much better.I'm not a big Lithgow fan, but I thought he did very well in this. I don't see why so many people hated this. I gave it a 9.**POSSIBLE SPOILER HEREAFTER** ******************************The darkest portion of this movie, which I think most people missed, is not Lithgow (Cain) capturing kids for the father. The darkest part is what they didn't show but only talked about. A father abused his own son to purposely create a disorder that he was trying to study -- not cure.
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