Word: palmas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...contrast to the more obvious cases, Sisters is an imitation come long after its wave has passed. As a result, Brian De Palma's film can hide its imitation of both Psycho and the exploiters of Psycho behind the more artistically acceptable term homage. De Palma thinks of his film in terms of homage, so Sisters is far more discouraging than a typical bandwagon exploiter. It deceives even the film maker -- a potentially good film maker at that. De Palma tries hard to lose his style amidst Hitchcock's. Fortunately, he doesn't succeed: his film still includes sections that...
...Palma made Greetings, a clever film about draft resistance that stood out above the typical youth films then being made. He has had as much trouble obtaining backing for films as most talented young directors, but he insists that Sisters is a film he had wanted to do for a long time, not a piece of commercial hackwork. The film appears under the American International Pictures label, and though that company is known mainly for its slick promotion of cheap sex, De Palma insists that the choice of a distributor was a business decision unrelated to his artistic intentions...
...central incident-a perhaps too ghastly knifing-reminds us of the famous shower-bath murder in Psycho, as does a splendid, spooky score by that film's masterful composer, Bernard Herrmann. More important than these specific references to glories past, however, is the Hitchcockian discipline De Palma brings to his storytelling, the delicate balance between humor and horror with which he permits it to unfold, the suspenseful way he lets the audience in on the plot's secret before his characters tumble...
...Palma's story is about a woman who survives an operation that separates her from her Siamese twin. She turns schizophrenic in an effort to keep her dead twin's spirit alive, then is allowed to roam dangerously free by the doctor who performed the operation. He in turn is both guilty about and possessive of the human accident he created. It is a weirdly plausible and marvelously original plot. So are the parodies that enliven the film: a lunatic TV game show that caters openly to voyeurism; an earnest and dimwitted documentary explicating the medical and psychological...
There is an appealing performance by Jennifer Salt as the investigative journalist whose cries of "Wolf, wolf!" go unheeded until it is almost too late, and Margot Kidder is touching and frightening as the most thoroughly split personality in movie history. Above all, however, Sisters reveals De Palma as capable of moving from the esoteric fringe of the movie world to its commercial center without sacrificing the exuberantly anarchic spirit that first marked him as a director worth watching. Sis ters provides moviegoers with the special satisfaction of finding a real treasure while prowling cinema's bargain basement. Richard...