throw some shots of a vaguely menacing fetus over the opening credits , toss in a brash score by bernard hermann , and you're off and running . is the baby gonna eat it's way out of the mother ? is there going to be some sort of killer baby run amok , a la some larry cohen flick , in brian de palma's sisters ( now out on dvd ) ? nope . false alarm . this sequence is pretty cool , but we don't have a mutant killer baby slashing up victims -- that honor goes to margot ( superman ) kidder . we start off with de palma's favorite theme : voyeurism . on a corny television program called peeping toms , the candid camera guest , philip ( likeable lisle wilson ) has to choose whether or not to let a blind woman know he's in her dressing room when she's changing clothes . he opts to be a gentleman and leave the room before she takes off her brassiere . the audience rewards him with a free dinner at an african restaurant , since he's a black guy . it's a bold , politically incorrect move which wouldn't be done nowadays . brian de palma had previously satirized race in hi , mom ! , but he eschews that here in favor of hitchcockian trickery . philip goes out on a date with the blind woman , who was really a french-canadian model living on staten island , danielle ( kidder , natch ) . after a nice trip back to her apartment for some pre-aids casual sex , our would-be hero philip learns that danielle has a twin and it's their collective birthday . he buys them a cake and brings it back to danielle's place . unfortunately for him , the deranged sister ( also kidder ) is waiting for him and she ain't interested in cutting the cake . the film , of course , is psycho . we follow a hero through the first half of the story only to have him hastily dispatched . our norman bates comes in the form of danielle , maybe , since it's never clear whether she's the psycho killer or it's her twin sister . our focus shifts to a nosy reporter who lives next door ( played by brassy jennifer salt ) who has witnessed the killing through her window . whether this is an homage to rear window or outright theft is debatable . of course , those lousy police won't lift a finger to help her since she gave them some negative press . we have the obligatory and painfully unfunny scenes where she tries to gets the cops to investigate , complete with " who's on first " dialogue not five minutes after we've seen a gory on-screen slaying . de palma was never one for maintaining an even tone in his films , shifting wildly from sadistic violence to slapstick . i'm sure he'd call it " playing the audience like a piano , " since he's been trying to be alfred hitchcock ever since 1973 . the character development is minimal , the situation so over-the-top as to prove laughable . margot kidder embarrasses herself with a va-va-voom french accent , but not so much as jennifer " pay attention to me " salt . de palma's camerawork is fairly mundane , except when he goes for his split screen parallel action bit as the cops are closing in and the body is being disposed . it feels like an episode from some bad sitcom . i gotta clean up this mess before dad gets home ! uh-oh ! here comes dad ! i'll just hide around this corner ! as for the surreal dream sequence which closes the film , involving black and white cinematography and an explanation of how that bizarre doctor ( william finley ) who's been scampering around throughout the film is involved with the sisters , well , this turns the movie into a carnival freakshow , complete with the seedy feeling of being ripped off afterwards . the half-jokey tone of the eleventh hour revelation probably didn't even play well back in 1973 . it sure doesn't work today . 
