Raising Cain (Brian De Palma, 1992)

There's cheerfully wanton stealing, like Tarantino's, which can be said to be a craft in itself, the massing of references in a collage offering an added reward for the cinephile viewer. The often-cited comparison to Shakespeare's cannibalising of existing plots may be a hackneyed one, but nevertheless contains a grain of truth. Closer to the mark might be T.S.Eliot's saturation bombardment of allusions to, and snatches from, a vast range of texts across the centuries in The Waste Land. The main difference is just that Tarantino has a shallower pool to draw from and, in Eliot's shoes, would probably have used a great deal more from penny dreadfuls and showtunes.

Then there's the smudged carbon-copying of Brian De Palma, usually of Hitchcock and here almost entirely so. He adds nothing but a patina of contemporary-strength gore to the Marnie/Psycho-reworking of the split personality killer and goes one worse by seemingly having decided, following decades of being ridiculed for his hero-worship, to parody himself. 

The end result is just awful. John Lithgow, as the titular headcase, is an actor with a wide range and an effortless command of modulated performances, but ends up in this morass of grand guignol campery just mugging the camera with gurns, basically Dick Solomon with a carving knife. Preposterous plotholes abound, the photography pokes you in the eyes with pointless split-focus shots and hypercoloured close-ups, and there isn't even the germ of an original idea to latch onto. It's a truly damning indictment of quality control in the studio system that some still see De Palma as an auteur. You can build the whole of the case for the prosecution on this film alone.

2/10