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).

Martin Bradley "Raising Cain" is often cited as minor DePalma but surely even minor DePalma is often so much better than the best of many other minor directors and even minor DePalma can be a lot of fun. His critics call him a plagarist and his many homages to Hitchcock, (some call them rip-offs but I don't), could, in other hands, become tiresome but Mr DePalma elevates them to the level of art. The plots may often be silly and he doesn't always bring out the best in his actors but the set pieces are gloroious if sometimes a little too obvious.Here "Psycho" gets the full-on treatment right down to the car in the swamp and the psychiatrist's explanation and, as in "Vertigo", he gives us the big reveal quite early on. But it's those set-pieces, in this case a slo-mo climax during a thunderstorm, that carry the picture and, of course, there's always John Lithgow pulling out all the stops and then some as a distinct first cousin of Norman Bates.

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

ShootingShark Carter Nix seems to be a devoted husband and father, but behind this facade lurks a shady past and some decidedly odd relations. When Carter's twisted brother Cain shows up and some local children go missing, can the police figure out what's going on in time ?Brian DePalma's best films are just so deliciously twisted, and in my view this is one of his very best. There are at least five fantastic aaaaahhhhh moments in it; the comatose wife awaking from her slumber at the wrong moment, Carter abruptly smothering Jenny with the pillow, the shocking twist on the old car-in-the-swamp Psycho moment, Jenny's sudden appearance on the baby monitor, Margot headbutting Dr Waldheim. All of these are beautifully, lovingly stylised, but the whole movie is just full of fantastic sequences, culminating in the terrific showdown at the motel. It also has a completely outstanding four-minute shot in the middle walking through the cop-shop, where Sternhagen ploughs through a ton of back-story, hits about a thousand marks (including some intentionally wrong ones) and emotes like there's no tomorrow. If ever you hear some phony-baloney actor type spouting off about have to struggle to find their character, show them this scene - Sternhagen is wild, funny, gripping, irascible, scared, intriguing and intense, all at the same time. Better yet, Lithgow is equally sensational, playing five characters with terrific abandon, weedy one moment, terrifying the next. Okay, so DePalma may have trodden this ground before (Sisters, Dressed To Kill, Body Double), but nobody does these crazy, sexy, twisty-turny thrillers as well as he does, and the cinematic power of these incredible set-pieces is just astonishing. Here's a movie where not a moment is wasted, where every shot is both artfully composed and intrinsically important, where every nuance the actors can provide contributes to the mood and the shocks. It's simply fantastic from start to finish. With a terrific score by Pino Donaggio (the music makes me scream every time) and fabulous photography throughout from Stephen H. Burum, this is a masterclass is technical filmmaking. Produce by Gale Anne Hurd (of Terminator fame) and brilliantly written and directed by DePalma, this is a great, gleeful, creepy, exciting, shocking, fantastically well-executed thriller.