One of his favorites involved the camera tracking the piecing together of a car on a Detroit assembly line, from steel skeleton to finished automobile.....
As the completed car rolls off the assembly belt, one of its doors is opened......and out falls a dead body.....ba-da-bum-bum....
Brilliantly perverse, senseless and loads of fun to imagine. But even Hitchcock, who laboriously worked with his writers in crafting scripts, couldn't fit that one in.....
No such adherence to logic ever afflicted Brian De Palma when cobbling together his various Hitchcock tributes and homages......
His 'Raising Cain' plays out like an entire collection of crazy, discarded Hitchcock ideas......it's a whole movie made up of 'dead-body-falls-out-of-the-Assembly-Line-car' sequences, barely glued together with a slapdash, completely bonkers storyline.........like blinking, colorful Christmas lights strung together with the thinnest of electrical wire......
It's basically 96 zippy minutes of De Palma pressing a joy buzzer inserted under your seat (much like shlockmeister William Castle did to people during "The Tingler"), while he screams out, "Howdja like that one? Wasn't that creepy and clever?........like a funhouse ride on the State Fair carnival midway, where you want to make sure the safety bar is all the way down while scary stuff pops out at you......
Not one to waste time with a slow "Psycho" build-up, De Palma allows premium ham John Lithgow to come tearing out of the gate, playing a touchy-feely child psychologist bedeviled by his evil Dad and equally nasty twin brother......(all played by Lithgow...making the film's Big Twist blatantly obvious, not that it matters.....)
While the Loony Lithgow triumvirate go about murdering moms and abducting their toddlers for weird behavioral experimentation, the relatively sane Lithgow's oncologist wife (Lolita Davidovich) carries on a heated affair with the widower of a cancer victim she treated.......(this leads to a spectacularly scary/funny hospital flashback that's beyond priceless....)
And De Palma's greatest hits just keep on comin'........he doubles down on the 'car-sinking-into-the-swamp' sequence from 'Psycho', (along with many other plunderings from that film, as well as Michael Powell's legendary 'Peeping Tom')......and finishes everything off with his patented slow motion Grand Opera finale in which heroes, villains and victims ever so elegantly collide......
Absurd? To the max. Entertaining? Oh, hell yes......a breathless parade of nonsense meant primarily by De Palma to rescue himself from the career-poisoning trainwreck of "Bonfire Of The Vanities".
And the BQ still had a juicy old time with it......so we'll raise 3 stars for "Raising Cain" (***).......a movie we place in one of our customized categories....Still Crazy After All These Years.....
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