User reviews

This has a seemingly convoluted plot. Carter (et al., played exceptionally well by John Lithgow) begins to grow strange when he learns that his wife is having an affair with her ex. He becomes more obsessed with their young daughter and a rash of kidnapping/ killings occur. His wife (Lolita Davidovich) must figure out if he is behind the crimes or if his "dead" father, who committed experiments on children to develop multiple personality disorders, is to blame. Whew…

What makes this film interesting, other than the above-stated reasons, is that they give away one of the twists at the very first scene. The audience is already aware that Carter has multiple personalities. What makes it more intriguing is that de Palma tricks the audience with constant flashbacks, dream sequences, and appearances made by "dead" people that are not really dead.

The film starts a tad slow during the first 15 minutes and seems Lifetime Channel worthy. But as the film progresses, it gets trippier and more Hitchcockian (paranoid, obsessive, and voyeuristic with a knock out ending). Oddly enough, this is rated "R", but for very little reason. There is no nudity, minimal sex, minimal violence, and no gore at all. Most of the violence is implied and the tension comes from the suspense built by de Palma, the disturbing subject matter, and dark atmosphere.

There are a few standout scenes that will creep the viewer out. My favorite was the hospital scene. It literally had me sinking into my couch as this thing slowly turns towards me. It scared the bejesus out of me and had me rewinding to catch a glimpse again. Other noteworthy scenes include the interrogation scene where Lithgow weaves in and out of his different personalities and the ending that is incredibly reminiscent of "Dressed to Kill".

Favorite Quote: "Hickory dickory dock. Cain has picked his lock. He did a bad deed and Josh comes to bleed. Hickory dickory dock."

DVD Extras: The barebones from Universal. Only Brief Production Notes and Original Trailer.

Bottom Line: A great psychological thriller. Gorehounds should pass though. A must for de Palma and Hitchcock fans.

Rating: 7/10

Jenny finds herself doubting if she is happy when her ex comes back into town... she reminds herself that she is married to the perfect man, an excellent psychiatrist who's taken time off his own practice to spend more time with their daughter, Amy. He is getting somewhat obsessive about it, though... almost like he's... studying her. De Palma goes so far in this homage to Hitchcock that the entire film is one big tribute to the master, and he plays with the camera as he also loves to do(we get a couple of long takes, one of them 4 full minutes, and one sequence has great use of slow-mo... not quite the subway scene in The Untouchables, of course), and we get a tension-packed, suspenseful psychological thriller(light, in the way that it uses the Hollywood approach to mental problems; it is actually a brutal, disturbing, bloody and violent piece with some strong sexuality... also setting it apart from Alfred's pictures - then again, he might have gone this far if the censorship laws had allowed for it, considering stuff like Frenzy), with a lot of the power coming from Lithgow's inherent creepiness(and he's perfectly cast, if some of what he's asked to do here is awkward... and do not look at the IMDb listings before watching, it will spoil a lot). The characters aren't bad(nothing spectacular, but likable and interesting enough), and the acting is plenty solid. This has a lot going on, especially as far as the plot goes(you may want to give it a second viewing just to make sure you picked up on everything that happened), and not only for a fast-paced movie that doesn't break 90 minutes. The chronology can really confuse you, as well as the score of surprises(and several fake-outs!). And at the end of the day, this is mainly meant to entertain you, and it lacks the kick of credible flicks. The DVD comes with a trailer. I recommend this to any fan of the director, star and the man whose body of work provided the inspiration. 6/10

It's disappointing when a movie starts well and then kind of derails by the end the way Raising Cain does. I'd liken it to another De Palma film from the 90s, Snake Eyes. Each get off to a strong start and have good first halves, but become noticeably less interesting in the second half (though neither is terrible overall).

What works here is John Lithgow. He's really great, and shines when playing the various personalities that his character moves between (whether this is at all accurate about multiple personality disorder at all is a whole other matter, and I'd understand people finding it offensive and dismissing it if they did believe it was an unfair or potentially dangerous depiction).

Funnily enough, the movie starts to feel like it's splitting off in multiple directions, but not in a good or thematic way. Suddenly, Lithgow's wife has a voiceover? And a melodramatic infidelity subplot? Too much time's spent on it- if you have Lithgow doing great acting and it's cut away from so much!

Then there are other various characters who are all introduced awkwardly, and the finale is all a bit underwhelming... it's a shame, because this starts as a very promising psychological thriller, and ends up being a bit disposable by the end. For a good first half and somewhat shaky/not great second half, I think splitting the score halfway to be a 6/10 is fair.

Despite the hordes of comments made about this film explaining where it 'went wrong', it appears a great deal of these reviews are from viewers failing to recognise the directors tongue in cheek intentions.

The film is a satirical thriller/horror that abides by the conventions of the genre, though twists them. Instead of concentrating on what the audience doesn't know and building up to a yawn-full climax, a cliché that Scream parodies, the film takes on the perspective of the psycho, presenting the audience with more information than other characters.

The obvious influences, or should I say homages, to Hitchcock show De Palma's respect for his predecessors, though it appears De Palma is also presenting us with a parody of Psycho, which is a reason in itself to watch this movie.

Along with other directors (Including Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas), Brian De Palma has been labelled as a 'movie brat', and I think this film is a prime example of a film made by this generation of filmmakers.

Lolita Davidovich runs into former boyfriend Steve Bauer and starts a steamy affair. Her husband John Lithgow has given up his psychiatric practice to raise their daughter, and she feels neglected as he devotes all his time to their kid. After a fairly bizarre series of dream sequences, she finds out her husband isn't who she thinks he is, kicking off an odyssey of psychotic twins, not-quite-so-dead fathers, murder, child kidnappings and split personalities.

I have seen this film a couple of times, and thought it was a brave attempt that didn't really work. I've now watched the new director's cut, and while it fixes some problems ... it still doesn't work. It fixes one major problem by not front-loading a lot of reveals about Lithgow and allowing more of the film to play out as a series of revelations. However, the first part that now focuses on Davidovich, is a fairly incoherent series of scenes of her suddenly waking up and pulling the rug out from under the viewer. Strangely, this cut seems to think that the viewer will be surprised by Lithgow's true nature, but really ... it so badly telescoped that I can't imagine anyone not seeing every surprise coming a mile away.

Truth be told ... many De Palma films relay on ridiculous plot twists and silly reveals, but they do so with style and elegance. This film ultimately fails because it substitutes weird, awkward staging and clumsy sequences where you expect elegance.

This movie is fine; there are some really great moments in it, but for the most part it just feels like a slightly above par thriller. If you're looking for something to watch on a rainy Saturday morning, this isn't a bad film to land on. Lithgow is great fun to watch, De Palma's homages to Hitchcock are great, and the editing in the director's cut is pretty unique, but overall this film runs over ground already well tread upon.

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.

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.

Raising Cain (1992)

*** (out of 4)

Jenny (Lolita Davidovich) believes that her husband Carter (John Lithgow) is the perfect man but what she doesn't realize is that his father messed with his mind a little too much and now his past is going to come back and haunt him.

Brian De Palma's RAISING CAIN was always a very disappointing movie to me because I felt it had so much potential but it never fully came out in the film. Director Peet Gelderblom would eventually re-edit the movie in a cut known as RAISING CAIN RE-CUT and director De Palma would praise it saying that this version is what he originally wanted to do with the film but he regretted changing his mind at the last second. Now this "Director's Cut" is available on Blu-ray and we can finally see this film for what it was meant to be.

I'm not going to give away any major spoilers but it should be said that the Director's Cut contains every frame that was in the Theatrical Cut. The only difference between the two is the way that they are edited and I must say that it's really amazing how much better the Director's Cut is. In fact, after viewing this version it becomes a complete nightmare why someone as great as De Palma would turn in the Theatrical Cut because it just doesn't play very well and a lot of the build up in the suspense department is just lost.

What is also more apparent in the Director's Cut is the flow of the film. If you're familiar with De Palma's work then you already know that he loves to keep a certain style and flow in his films and it's much more clear in this cut of the movie. The opening scenes really set you up for the thriller that is going to follow and I thought the entire movie played much better. It certainly helps build up the suspense as the madness of the Lithgow character slowly builds until he eventually breaks. The "clues" that De Palma gives off are a lot more shocking when they finally reveal themselves as well.

The one great thing about whichever version you watched was the performance of Lithgow. He's playing multiple characters here with multiple personalities and he perfectly brings them to life and really creates a rather creepy and mentally disturbing character. I thought Davidovich was a bite too light here but we get some nice supporting performances including the one from Steven Bauer and Frances Sternhagen.

Most people considered RAISING CAIN a major disappointment but I would ask, or beg, those people to give the movie another chances in the Director's Cut. It really goes to show how important editing is and how a bad edit of a movie can ruin it.

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.

After the critical and commercial public flogging he received for his bastardisation of Tom Wolfe's fascinating, multi-layered and often hilarious novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Brian De Palma turned back to the genre that had served him well early on his career, the psychological thriller. With crime 'biopic' The Untouchables (1987) and the hit-and-miss war drama Casualties of War (1989), De Palma has seemingly turned his back on the world of Hitchockian suspense, but his career was in serious danger. The result was Raising Cain, a movie so utterly ludicrous and ham-fisted that it's a wonder how he is still making movies. Yet, there's something perversely irresistible about the film.

Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow) is a respected psychologist suffering from multiple personality disorder, who, at the beginning of the movie, chloroforms a young mother and steals her child while being egged on by one of his cockier alter-egos, Cain. His wife Jenny (90's mainstay Lolita Davidovich) is concerned that Carter is spending too much time obsessing over their daughter, who he seems to view more of a subject of study than his own flesh and blood. Jenny rekindles a romance with a former flame, Jack (Steven Bauer), and the two are spotted by Carter making love in the woods. As Carter struggles to keep his many personalities in check, Jenny struggles to separate her dreams from reality.

While watching the movie, I kept wondering if this was truly the same De Palma who forged such well-constructed thrillers as Sisters (1973), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981); films that often carefully towed the line of B-movie daftness yet managed to stay grounded. Is Raising Cain a bad movie? Yes, probably. But with the casting of De Palma's favourite ham John Lithgow and its sickly, TV movie aesthetic, there's something oddly fascinating about its silliness. It attempts to confuse its already convoluted plot even further by staging scenes within dreams within memories within more dreams. While this is certainly frustrating, I was still rooted to my seat, desperate to see how this nonsense plays out. His films are often divisive, but Raising Cain had even the most hardcore De Palma fans questioning their loyalty. Personally, my love far outweighed the hate.

Silly title for a rather silly Brian De Palma thriller which nevertheless, once you park any expectations of realism or even seriousness, certainly entertains on a grand scale. I've read the word "camp" used around this movie and it's certainly justified with a cross-dressing, split personality John Lithgow who contributes a performance so over-the-top, he could look down on Everest from where he is.

He's Carter the ordinary, average, supportive husband of his altogether more glamorous, high-flying wife, Jenny, played by the wonderfully-named Lolita Davidovich, a brain surgeon who crosses the old doctor/patient line with the handsome husband, Steven Bauer, of one of her recently deceased brain-damaged patients who inconveniently has her fatal final attack just when the doc and the visiting hubby are - ahem! - otherwise distracted. Some time later, the two meet again by chance in a gift shop and their spark is rekindled although the way that she actually ends up in his bed couldn't be more contrived if it was an official governmental statement.

The other main plot strand concerns the disappearance of various infant children, which brings us back to Lithgow, who along with a seemingly evil twin brother and dastardly scientist father, kidnaps the kids for mean old dad to carry out his nefarious experiments.

It gets even crazier as we're introduced to a bewigged female psycho-analyst, a murder attempt involving a sinking car, lifted, surprise surprise, from the end of "Psycho", more murders and kidnappings and a big slow-motion finale where he re-uses a pram as a prop a few years after one crossed Eliot Ness's path as well as delivering a neat final shock-shot just for good measure.

At times, with its glossy, stylised visuals, soft-core sex-scenes and re-heating of many of his previous ideas, you sometimes think that this is the work of a devoted film student homaging De Palma the way he did Hitchcock years before, but even if it is ridiculously ludicrous and peopled with cardboard characters acting silly in more ways than one, there's always some camera-angle or surprise sequence occurring just around the corner to catch and usually hold your attention.

If there's one word that sums up Raising Cain, it's 'audacious': Brian De Palma, a director not known for his restraint, goes all out with this crazy psychological thriller, delivering a baffling non-linear narrative, commanding a bonkers performance from star John Lithgow, and shamelessly showboating with some outrageous visual set-pieces, including plenty of his trademark slow-motion (accompanied by a lush Psycho-style score by Pino Donaggio) and an extremely impressive, very long continuous take. Raising Cain is a film that appears to be self-parodic, De Palma seemingly mocking his own ostentatious style; I don't know whether this was by design or by accident - either way, it's hard to not have fun with such a delightfully daft, OTT movie.

Lithgow plays husband and doting father Carter, whose wife Jenny (Lolita Davidovich) embarks on an affair with her previous lover, Jack (Steven Bauer). Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Jenny, her husband suffers from multiple personality disorder, and is instrumental in a spate of local kidnappings, which ultimately leads to him framing Jack for murder. The plot jumps back and forth through time, making it extremely hard to follow at times, but it eventually pulls together for the final act, in which Carter (as one of his alter-egos, Cain) and his presumed dead father (also Lithgow), threaten the life of Jenny's daughter Amy (Amanda Pombo).

In addition to the Bernard Hermann style score, De Palma references Psycho with a scene in which Carter pushes a car with his wife's body inside into a marsh, and has his villain dress up as a woman (to evade the police), but this film is not a slavish homage to all things Hitchcock: it's way too unhinged for that. And if I'm not mistaken, there's also a nod to De Palma's Italian counterpart, Dario Argento, the shot in which Jenny kneels down to hug Amy only to reveal that Carter/Cain is standing behind her being borrowed from Tenebrae.

The lunacy culminates in a wonderfully overblown, meticulously orchestrated piece of slow motion chaos that attempts to outdo De Palma's Odessa Steps sequence from The Untouchables, but the preposterous nature of proceedings renders it laughable - and consequently very entertaining if you enjoy schlocky cinema.

6.5/10, rounded up to 7 for the single take that ends in a hilarious close-up of a victim's face: even if you don't like the film as a whole, it's impossible to deny the technical brilliance of that continuous shot.

This utterly demented Thriller quite clearly tells us all exactly why having multiple personalities doesn't always add up to good entertainment.

Like - Just take actor, John Lithgow here, playing a pair of murderous, multiple personality twins in "Raising Cain" - As Josh/Cain Nix (or whoever), Lithgow constantly goes way-way over-the-top no matter what character (?) he's playing.

And, soon enough it all becomes downright ludicrous and, yes, unintentionally laughable, just to watch this unconvincing fool become yet another persona.

Believe me - This is one distastefully screwy movie where neither the chills, nor the thrills, nor even the unintentional chuckles, add up to very much, at all.

John Lithgow gets a great multi-role arc to play in De Palma's bizarre domestic thriller about the son of a child psychiatrist who might be having a complete break from reality and starts becoming different people who mean his family harm. It's not De Palma's finest work and he repeats himself a bit, but it's always at least amusing.

I would call this a major disappointment if not for the fact that I've always heard it was pretty bad before I finally got around to seeing it. But it's still a major letdown in the sense that I generally enjoy Brian DePalma's films, so I was quite shocked that this was completely empty in every way. And to add insult to injury, DePalma even wrote this nonsense! It features John Lithgow as a crackpot with multiple personalities who kidnaps little children and is tormented by the memories of his equally nutty dad, who made him the basket case he is today. We're never quite sure what the point of everything is supposed to be; the plot is nowhere to be found. All we can surmise is that this detached husband/father has different people battling inside of him. Well, that may have been enough at one time in cinematic history, but by 1992 it was too old hat on its own to sustain interest. As bad as this movie is, I at least expected Lithgow to make a good looney bird; instead, his dopey characterizations come off as funny rather than intense or threatening. He adds nothing to the mix, and neither do the other actors nor their characters.

I didn't even get the usual vibe of intriguing direction from DePalma, and what very few instances of visual style I could see were things not only borrowed from Hitchcock (as we're now prepared to expect), but even DePalma's own DRESSED TO KILL (1980)! I found this dog to be completely without worth, and that's why I gave it my lowest rating. 0 out of ****

Brian De Palma has had his periodic successes (e.g., The Untouchables), which perhaps makes it all the more frustrating to witness something like Raising Cain, which - after much consideration - I would have to say is one of the five worst movies I have ever seen. That he wrote the screenplay is one more reason to be upset.

The storyline is laughable, the acting is uniformly dreadful (even credible actors like Lithgow and Davidovich offer cringe-worthy performances), De Palma's blatant I-wish-I-were-Hitchcock direction has never been more pitiful - or unsuccessful - and the movie's climactic scene is so inane, so obviously contrived (if you _must_ watch this, you'll see what I mean by the truck carrying the sundial doing nothing the entire climax except strategically backing up and going forward), that you will be tempted to simply turn off the VCR. Let me save you the temptation: just don't rent it at all.