You gotta' love Brian De Palma. Some of the most playful moments in modern American cinema has come from his cunning mind. Sure, half his movies are all about paying homage to Hitchcock, but he tributes the great master of suspense better than any other film-maker out there and more importantly; he manages to make these Hitchcockesque moments his own.
I don't know about the rest of the movie-geeks out there, but personally I would take a Hitchcock-wannabe any day over a, say, Spielberg or Leone-wannabe (two directors I worship by the way).
RAISING CAIN has fun referencing Hitchcock's PSYCHO as well as early De Palma-classics like SISTERS and DRESSED TO KILL. Though not on their level, RAISING CAIN *is* a neat little thriller with some pretty chilling moments (the love scene over the dying wife in the hospital, the nightmare, the finale, etc). Here he even copies a scene directly from PSYCHO (the car in the water) but then adding that little extra detail that makes the moment even more shocking.
This was a welcomed return back to horror-territory after the directors disappointing BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES and CASUALTIES OF WAR. Horror is Brian De Palma's genre, and messing with the audience's mind is his thing. He is the kind of guy who would take a scene between a psychiatrist and his patient talking over a table, and screw with your head just by placing a syringe in the same scene. The syringe, laying innocently on the table between them will keep you on your toes through the entire conversation, out of fear that the psycho any moment will go for the instrument and shove it into the doctors eye or something, or he just might not. Either way you can't loose. De Palma has the audience by the balls, so to speak.
Being from Norway myself there is added value knowing that the main bad-guy is a Norwegian. There haven't been lots of Norwegian creeps in American movies, but the few there are sure manage to make an impression, such as 'Gaear Grimsrud' (Peter Stormare) in FARGO or 'Lars Thorwald' (Raymond Burr) in Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW. Maybe it's the midnight sun or eating too much reindeer that is driving us loco, I don't know.
To sum it all up, RAISING CAIN is good, chilling fun, and the critics who dissed it all deserve to be kidnapped and taken to "a clinic outside Oslo".
I don't know about the rest of the movie-geeks out there, but personally I would take a Hitchcock-wannabe any day over a, say, Spielberg or Leone-wannabe (two directors I worship by the way).
RAISING CAIN has fun referencing Hitchcock's PSYCHO as well as early De Palma-classics like SISTERS and DRESSED TO KILL. Though not on their level, RAISING CAIN *is* a neat little thriller with some pretty chilling moments (the love scene over the dying wife in the hospital, the nightmare, the finale, etc). Here he even copies a scene directly from PSYCHO (the car in the water) but then adding that little extra detail that makes the moment even more shocking.
This was a welcomed return back to horror-territory after the directors disappointing BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES and CASUALTIES OF WAR. Horror is Brian De Palma's genre, and messing with the audience's mind is his thing. He is the kind of guy who would take a scene between a psychiatrist and his patient talking over a table, and screw with your head just by placing a syringe in the same scene. The syringe, laying innocently on the table between them will keep you on your toes through the entire conversation, out of fear that the psycho any moment will go for the instrument and shove it into the doctors eye or something, or he just might not. Either way you can't loose. De Palma has the audience by the balls, so to speak.
Being from Norway myself there is added value knowing that the main bad-guy is a Norwegian. There haven't been lots of Norwegian creeps in American movies, but the few there are sure manage to make an impression, such as 'Gaear Grimsrud' (Peter Stormare) in FARGO or 'Lars Thorwald' (Raymond Burr) in Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW. Maybe it's the midnight sun or eating too much reindeer that is driving us loco, I don't know.
To sum it all up, RAISING CAIN is good, chilling fun, and the critics who dissed it all deserve to be kidnapped and taken to "a clinic outside Oslo".