#255: Dressed to Kill

Release Date: July 25th, 1980

Format: Criterion Collection on Blu-ray

Written by: Brian De Palma

Directed by: Brian De Palma

4 Stars

Provocative and derivative. Those are the words that came to mind while watching Brian De Palma’s 1980 film, Dressed to Kill. Not exactly the most complimentary words.  

But I get the sense that De Palma would take them as a compliment. 

De Palma the Provocateur must be intentional with this entirely implausible story of a transgender psychiatrist who murders attractive females for the simple fact that they arouse him. How ridiculous! (and potentially offensive). And what about his blatant thievery of Hitchcock? Dressed to Kill seems entirely derived from Hitch’s oeuvre. Psycho especially! 

He can’t get away with this, the audience is thinking. 

Watch me, says De Palma.

Take, for example, the infamous shower scene from Psycho, one of, if not the most iconic scenes in film history. 

Not even that scene is sacred. Hitch was restrained in 1960 by social mores and still strict Hollywood production codes, but not me, De Palma gloats. My film’s first murderous shower scene (yes, my movie has two of them) won’t bother with discreet black and white photography and chocolate sauce as a stand-in for blood, so as to not offend the studio. Instead, in my opening scene, I’ll give you ‘50s pinup Angie Dickinson, fully nude, with Penthouse Playmate Victoria Lynn Johnson as a stand-in for the close-ups shots of our protagonist’s breasts and genitalia. And the blood? You better believe it will be red and there will be lots of it.

And the killer? De Palma asks. Hitch gave you a solitary loser taxidermist who was too scared to exist outside of the shadow of his domineering mother. But my killer is a hunter, a transgender psychoanalyst who enjoys a murderous rage when he’s aroused by a woman, because it reminds him of a gender he hates being. Isn’t that deliciously provocative?

It is. It could also be labeled as hurtful or misguided, or both. 

De Palma seems fine risking that. His Dressed to Kill is so confident, so sumptuous, so unrestrained, that you can’t dismiss it, even if you don’t buy it. 

Postscript: There are some killer set pieces in this thing, pardon the pun. The museum scene is a masterpiece. I don’t think I blinked the entire time.