From: grada@columbia.dsu.edu (Alison Grad)
Subject: Re: RAISING CAIN
Organization: Dakota State University
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 16:00:15 GMT

In article <1992Aug31.135546.17706@cbnewsj.cb.att.com> leeper@cbnewsj.cb.att.com (mark.r.leeper) writes:
>From: leeper@cbnewsj.cb.att.com (mark.r.leeper)
>Subject: RAISING CAIN
>Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 13:55:46 GMT

>                                RAISING CAIN
>                      A film review by Mark R. Leeper

>          Capsule review:  Bizarre Gratia Bizarre.  Brian De Palma
>     directs his own not-ready-for-primetime script.  He sew
>     together big swaths from PEEPING TOM, PSYCHO, and others,
>     then does not have the plot thread to hold them together in a
>     decent story.  Very much a lesser effort of a decent
>     filmmaker.  Rating: low 0 (-4 to +4).  (Warning: some
>     spoilers occur in this review.)

>     At one point Brian De Palma was a clever and innovative filmmaker.
>PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is a terrific tour de force.  Arguably it was De
>Palma who put Stephen King on the map with his excellent adaptation of
>CARRIE.  De Palma also proved he could do Hitchcock thrillers as well as
>Hitchcock himself.  In fact, when De Palma's OBSESSION played concurrently
>with Hitchcock's FAMILY PLOT, I claimed it was OBSESSION that Hitchcock
>should have been prouder of.  I also think that in spite of some of the
>obvious faults, SCARFACE is probably the most exciting gangster film of the
>last ten years.  But De Palma borrowed too often from Hitchcock, and his
>films like BODY DOUBLE became too predictable.  Also he was the wrong
>director for BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES.  You have to be very careful giving an
>escapist director a film of social comment.  Now he is back with a non-
>Hitchcockian thriller that he wrote himself., but he is making a mess of
>things.  (It may be overstating things to call it his script; De Palma
>heavily plunders other films such as SYBIL and PEEPING TOM.)

>     Carter Nix (played by John Lithgow) is a child psychologist who so
>loves his baby daughter that he has taken two years off of his practice just
>to study her.  In fact, he constantly has cameras on her so that she never
>has a private moment.  (Yes, a directed steal from Michael Powell's PEEPING
>TOM.)  But we find out very quickly that Carter is stealing babies for a
>psychological experiment.  His wife Jenny (played by Lolita Davidovich)
>knows nothing of this and is carrying on her own secret life (with the
>accent on "carrying on").  The first mild absurdity happens in the first
>sixty seconds of the film, when a friend (played by Teri Austin) offers
>Carter and daughter a ride and just happens to have a spare baby seat in the
>car.  This is only a tiny absurdity and De Palma could have explained it,
>but chose not to in order to condition the viewer to accept larger and
>larger absurdities without explanation.  The climax of the film is a
>flabbergasting lulu requiring precise split-second timing to convince the
>audience that no events as shown could ever occur on planet Earth.

>     De Palma's script makes clear that he did not have enough story to fill
>a film.  While the RAISING CAIN length of 97 minutes is not actually
>outlandishly short, the film is only that long due to a lengthy sequence
>that is nothing but a throwaway adding zilch to the story but a gratuitous
>car accident.  At some point this film was probably written to be a tour de
>force for John Lithgow playing multiple roles, but in fact he just gives
>weak impressions of James Spader and Max Von Sydow (with exaggerated Swedish
>accent while playing a Norwegian).  This new film makes De Palma appear to
>be no so much raising cain as just being less able.  I rate it a low 0 on
>the -4 to +4 scale.

>                                        Mark R. Leeper
>                                        att!mtgzy!leeper
>                                        leeper@mtgzy.att.com
>                                        Copyright 1992 Mark R. Leeper

I give it a -5 on yor scale...  Don't waste yor money.

Alison