Raising Cain (1992)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

the audience applauded

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

this is a good Saturday night feature to view! make some popcorn and get ready for a weird but fun ride. famous actors are in it which surprised me because it is a cheesy film but entertaining .not gory like today's offerings. it held my attention to the very end. give it a try and you just might enjoy it!

Jenny Nix (Lolita Davidovich), wife of eminent child psychologist Carter Nix (John Lithgow), becomes increasingly concerned about her husband's seemingly obsessive concern over the upbringing of their daughter (Amanda Pombo).This is not De Palma's strongest film and is more than a little strange and far-fetched. We do have just a bit of voyeurism, which seems necessary to make this part of the De Palma oeuvre. But seriously, this whole film is like a 90-minute audition tape for John Lithgow, showing off his range of characters and emotions.Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly summed it up nicely when he wrote, "Is Raising Cain a good movie? No way. You could almost say it's intentionally bad — a gleeful piece of jerry-built schlock. Yet De Palma's naughty-boy gamesmanship has a perverse fascination, even when it doesn't work (which is most of the time)."

If you're in the mood for a slightly challenging horror film with some over-the-top characterization from John Lithgow, and some incredible camera work typical of a Brian DePalma film, and you don't mind some lapses in logic or unresolved narrative strands drifting off into dark garages, this is a diverting psychological thriller, with Lithgow essaying at least four different characters, and lots of suspense built around who someone is going to kidnap or mutilate next.Raising Cain involved my brain for an hour or so, and by the next morning my brain had erased the film and wanted something more substantial--and there are plenty of DePalma films that fit the bill. Carrie, Dressed To Kill or Blow Out, if you want plenty of suspense, or The Untouchables, Carlito's Way or Scarface if you want a substantial tale crammed with solid characters and an epic plot.

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