Sisters

Brian De Palma‘s shocking exploitation gut-punch, Sisters, is a perfectly orchestrated exercise in style, a staging of some of the finest suspense sequences since Alfred Hitchcock was above ground. Read full review

Though Sisters is an undeniably tight homage to Hitchcock from an obviously indebted De Palma, I am still inclined to place it at least a tier below the likes of Dressed to Kill and Body Double. Read full review

As a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best. Read full review

Sisters never carries any feeling that De Palma is showing off or flexing his cinematic chops because he can, or is above the material. The film is utterly transfixing because it plays its schlock straight, and paired with Hermann’s hair-raising throwback score, the effect is giddy. Read full review

Kidder's performance as Danielle is a highlight, creating a childlike woman who is beguilingly naive yet obviously fraught with peril. [22 Sep 2000]

A good, substantial horror film with such a sense of humor that it never can quite achieve the solemnly repellent peaks of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion." Read full review

The first full flowering of the De Palma style, the film cleverly uses split-screens and cross-cutting to string the audience along while heightening the emotions of any given scene nearly to the point of parody. The movie is playful and provocative -- at once one of the scariest and funniest horror movies of the '70s. [21 Oct 2018, p.E7]

Brian De Palma’s Sisters was made more or less consciously as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, but it has a life of its own and it’s a neat little mystery picture. Read full review

Although one of his earliest films, SISTERS still stands as director Brian De Palma's greatest contribution to the horror genre. Read full review

What elevates Sisters above a standard Hitchcock rip-off, and makes it authentically De Palma, is its typically unsubtle and scathing social critique. Read full review

Sisters is a good psychological murder melo- drama, starring Margot Kidder as the schizoid half of Siamese twins, and Jennifer Salt as a news hen driven to terror in her investigation of a bloody murder. Brian De Palma's direction emphasizes exploitation values which do not fully mask script weakness. Read full review

An effective thriller, Sisters is an intense tightly executed slasher, which fans of the directors later work will revel in. Read full review

The effective use of the split-screen creates a splintered sense of reality and piles on the tension. [04 Jul 2015, p.33]

In retrospect, it does indeed appear as a highly efficient gut-ripper, with far more suggestion than De Palma's later work of the loose-end flux of real life going on in the background. There is, however, much early evidence of his rampant misogyny, his increasingly blatant stealings from Hitchcock, and most unforgivable of all, his clear distaste for the people he creates. Read full review

The facetious dialogue is a wet blanket, and De Palma isn't quite up to his apparent intention -- to provide cheap thrills that are also a parody of old corn.

At the time, its way of wringing thrills from genre conventions at the same time it mocked them seemed imaginative and original; but in the light of Carrie (1976), Obsession (1976), and The Fury (1978), it seems more like a dead end—the mark of a superficial stylist unable to take anything seriously, including his own work. Read full review