LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Executscan Expected more

TeenzTen An action-packed slog

Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Carycomic And it was still just as suspenseful as the first time I saw it in theaters. Why John Lithgow never even got nominated for Best Actor at the 65th academy Awards is still beyond me. I thought he did a magnificent job playing Carter, his evil twin brother Cain, and their even more screwed up father, Dr. Nix! Not to mention the plot twists involving Josh and Margo. Lola Davidovitch was also great as Dr. Jenny O'Keefe. A working mom who keeps her maiden name for modern feminist reasons; and who ultimately proves beauty, brains, and bravery aren't mutually exclusive. And long time fans of both MURDER, SHE WROTE, and BEVERLY HILLS 90210 are bound to get a kick out of recognizing character acting veterans Gregg Henry and Gabrielle Carteris, respectively. In short; this is the finest erotic homage to Alfred Hitchcock ever done by Brian DePalma. It even tops his previous homage DRESSED TO KILL! Which is saying a lot (and justifiably, too).

oOoBarracuda After watching Carlito's Way, and positively falling in love with the film, I did what I typically tend to do, and begin seeking out more works from the director. I was a mixed bag in regards to Brian De Palma before Carlito's Way, I had seen Carrie, Scarface, and The Untouchables. I nearly despise Scarface, and thought Carrie was "alright" but Carlito's Way enticed me to see more of his work. De Palma made Raising Cain in 1992, just one year before Carlito's Way. Other than knowing of the director's involvement, you could not have convinced me that these films were by the same person. As different in tone as they are in storyline, Raising Cain follows a child psychologist destined to finish the work of his father, leading a double life unbeknownst to his wife. Coming off a bit like a made-for-TV movie, Raising Cain was a bizarre journey into the psyche of someone with Dissociative identity disorder. Child psychologist Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow) spends a lot of time with his daughter, almost to an obsessive degree. This arrangement works well for his busy oncologist wife, Jenny (Lolita Davidovich). Although, Jenny sometimes feels uncomfortable by the amount of time Carter spends with their daughter, and his level of involvement in her daily life, Jenny's friends keep telling her hos much they wish their husbands were even a bit like Carter, putting her mind temporarily at ease. Just as her fears begin to resurface again, she rekindles an old romance with a man she met at the hospital years before.Jenny being preoccupied with her old flame puts her motherly duties aside and is more than willing to allow Carter the amount of time he has become used to having with their daughter. What Jenny doesn't know, is that Carter leads a whole other life that she knows nothing about wherein he kidnaps children to perform experiments on them with his father who is believed to be dead. After finding out about his wife's affair, Carter summons his brother "Cain" to kill his wife and incriminate her lover. When Jenny survives and begins to find out just what her husband is up to, she begins a chase with the police to find her daughter before Carter can replicate his deranged father's experiments. There is a lot to unpack in Raising Cain, as there often is in a film dealing with Dissociative identity disorder. De Palma was certainly at what seems to be his most unhinged in Raising Cain, not afraid to create a story line difficult to follow fraught with confusion and unsettling imagery. Raising Cain suffers a bit from its zany approach. Not that a film needs a strict genre, but the film definitely couldn't decide what it wanted to be. In parts horror, other parts suspense, and other parts psychological thriller; Raising Cain attempts to fulfill any genre it can, succeeding nowhere. John Lithgow seems grossly miscast, which is unfortunate because, in one way or another, his is the face the audience sees on screen the most. The film did have an engaging sound design, preventing one from turning the film off before it ends. The sound is actually the most engaging aspect of the film, which shouldn't be the case in a film as all over the place as this one. I did enjoy the same wonderful low angle shots so prevalent in Carlito's Way, so that was a plus. Ultimately, Raising Cain never picks a lane, preventing it from speeding away effectively in any of them, reminiscent of a Lifetime movie that only putters once it gets in the air.

Claudio Carvalho The psychologist Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow) leaves a park with his little daughter Amy and takes a ride with the mother of another child. He tries to convince her to leave her son travel to Norway for an experiment with his father but she does not accept. Dr. Nix uses chloroform to take her boy and leaves the unconscious woman in the trunk of her car with his brother Cain to get rid of her. His wife Dr. Jenny Nix (Lolita Davidovich) is worried about his obsession for Amy. When Jenny meets her former lover Jack (Steven Bauer) in a store, she has a love affair with him and plans to leave her husband. However Carter discovers their love affair and he kills a babysitter and leaves clues incriminating Jack. Then he suffocates Jenny with a pillow, puts her body into her car and submerges it in a swamp. Carter goes to the police department claiming that his wife and his daughter are missing. He also tells that he had seen a stranger in the park. Lt. Terri (Gregg Henry) and Sgt. Cally (Tom Bower) that are in charge of the investigation asks Carter to do a sketch of the suspect. However a veteran detective recalls the case of Carter's father and he summons Dr. Waldheim (Frances Sternhagen) that discloses how deranged his father was. Out of the blue, Jenny returns and now the police needs to find where the kidnapped children are."Raising Cain" is a deceptive thriller by Brian De Palma, with a flawed, conventional, predictable and poorly story. The plot is unbelievable, commercial and silly, with the strange situations easily resolved. How could Jenny escape from a car submerged in a swamp? Her infidelity that triggers completely madness in Carter becomes "politically correct". Jack saving Amy with the spear coming toward him is ridiculous. The conclusion might be a joke or a tribute to "Dressed to Kill". My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Síndrome de Caim" ("Cain Sindrome")

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU This film is going to make you feel berserk and even maybe completely corrugated. Cain has been haunting Semitic and Western civilizations like hell – the proper word of course – since the birth of Ra. There is always somewhere in the godly, godlike and divine families a treacherous brother in a way or another. Strangely enough Freud preferred the treacherous only son, Oedipus, but the spectre of Cain is still flying high and strong in the sky of western and even slightly more than western consciousness.Brian de Palma had to invent a trick to make it slightly more interesting than just the bad younger brother who killed his elder brother. So he goes rake in the ashes of psychoanalysis with a lot of popular people vestment and sauce and comes up with the mad scientist, in this case mad psychoanalyst who decided to test his theory about split personalities on his own son.The idea is simple and it is said to be natural and the perversion is only the activation of it by a doctor and a father. Anyone has one personality and every single time they do something wrong or are afraid of doing something wrong they just shift the responsibility to a phantasmagorical brother Cain who takes the blame and you are free and clean like a virgin. This of course happens in your mind and you can always yell at that brother before he does the wrong thing and that's it.In this case we have somewhere a father who has been forced to develop a double personality by his own father. This bad Cain in him makes him steal children for his father to go on experimenting on live guinea pigs, or guinea fowls if you prefer feathered birds to bristled mammals, And then the wife, the daughter, and everyone else does not know what is happening except that bodies turn up here and there and children disappear from here and there.There will be a very good ending since only grownups and women die (don't tell me Brian de Palma is sexist), and a very bad ending since Cain has migrated into virtual reality and can now navigate in the world without having nothing to say to anyone and no account to give though a lot of account to settle.Poor Cain. To be like that cursed to death and forever just because God decided not to favour his present of fruits of the soil and preferred the animal presents from Abel. God cursed Cain after he killed Abel and yet Cain is the father of music and arts and of metal work, hence of the metallurgy revolution that took place some time in the middle of the Neolithic transformation and made the conquest of Europe by a minority of Indo-Europeans possible since they had metal for ploughing the earth and for defending themselves.Here de Palma only keeps the horror of the curse. Too bad because Cain is a child of light in spite of the curse God sent him: the future was not in migratory herd keepers but in sedentary agricultural workers. God had it all wrong in a way because God was a conservative conservationist. I guess God would vote against Monsanto and GMOs.We should start a Cain alliance to bring together all those who have been the victims of some higher up bureaucrats who think they are Gods because they have an armchair in an air-conditioned office, and a lot of free time to do nothing at all except jerking their neuronal and neurotic dendrites.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU