Dressed To Kill (1980) – Review

Before his move into the crime genre with Scarface and The Untouchables, there were two things you could depend on when settling down to watch a Brian De Palma movie: one, he’d be homaging Alfred Hitchcock like his life depended on it and two, he’d be attempting to do it in the most provocative, sleazy way he could. Both of these selling points came to an impressive head in 1980 with Dressed To Kill, an erotic thriller that skewed so far into its violently salacious exploration into the sexual frustrations of its characters, it punched right though Hitchcock-land and ended up in Dario Argento-ville. Essentially an unabashed American Giallo movie (the name given to the violent, sexually charged genre of Italian psycho-thrillers), De Palma threw every cinematic trick in the book to make the movie as delirious and unpredictable as he possibly could and the results – for better or worse – are still debated to this very day.

Kate Miller is a housewife who has become so sexually frustrated by her moribund love life that she’s started having rather violent fantasies in order to counteract her husband’s bland, vanilla humping. At the end of her tether and hornier than a rabbit in June, Kate offloads her issues to her oh-so-serious therapist, Dr. Robert Elliott and inevitably makes a pass at the dashing fella, only to be gently rebuffed when he refuses to jeopardise his marriage.
Planning to spend the day with her inventor son, Peter, at an art gallery, she’s knocked back again when his most recent science project reaches a critical stage, so Kate goes there alone, hoping for some inspiration. Inspiration arises in the form of a handsome stranger she spies at the art gallery and after an extended scene of cat and mouse where we see her courage to persue the guy ebb and fade, she finally hooks up with the guy. However, after a spirited tumble in a taxi cab and a full on boning session in the stranger’s apartment, Kate is initially elated at finally scratching that amorous itch, but then, to her horror, finds that she’ll be scratching a whole lot more when she discovers that her conquest has a smorgasbord of sexually transmitted diseases.
Putting an end to a perfect day, Kate then has a run in with a mysterious blonde woman, who attacks her in the elevator with a straight razor and in the bloody aftermath, only a single witness of the shocking crime exists, enterprising, high priced, call girl Liz Blake. Teaming up with Peter, the pair attempt to track down the attacker with the help of his various gadgets, but unbeknownst to them, Dr. Elliott may already know who did the violent deed – a volatile, former patient named Bobbi who has something of a complicated sexual history herself…

While some older movies often have an elephant in the room that usually have to be addressed before we launch fully into an appraisal, Brian De Palma’s gloriously sordid Dressed To Kill has enough to comfortably fill an elephant’s graveyard. I mean where do we start? Should it be with the incredibly forthright A-plot that sees Angie Dickinson embark on a quest to get fucked by a stranger? How about the fact that De Palma’s obsession with Alfred Hitchcock means that the entire plot of Dressed To Kill mirrors that of Psycho almost exactly? Or maybe we should springboard from there to touch upon some dated gender politics that sees the main antagonist, Bobbi, revealed to be a dangerously violent transgender person who is desperate to get used reassignment surgery, that rubs a little uncomfortably against modern conventions?
Well, I suppose we’d better tackle the touchiest subject first, and while the film has since been deemed controversial by leaning heavily into the whole LGBTQ+ equals psycho trope that also got Silence Of The Lambs singled out, it’s not exactly a new thing as the Giallo genre been doing it for years. Ok, so it’s not the most sensitive way to introduce the concept of a transgender person into a major cinematic release, De Palma does attempt and explain matters a little with a Psycho-esque explanation and a TV interview. However, while it’s important to state that Bobbi is a transgender person who just happens to be insane and not someone who is insane because they are transgender, the fact that most people’s introduction to this world is a man in a dress slicing up a woman with a straight razor – I suppose that some of its detractors have a point.

However, that hopefully shouldn’t stop you from enjoying from De Palma going all out to deliver a thriller that takes the notion of a Hitchcockian thriller and dunks it in more modern attitudes of sex and violence much in the sane way Paul Verhoven did in the 90s with Basic Instinct. While this obsession with the Master of Suspense could be seen as a negative (all the twists – the premature slaughter of the lead, the killer being revealed as the male lead – are literally beat for beat takes from Psycho), he does it all with such gusto, you can’t help but forgive it. In fact, De Palma takes his job of updating and modernizing Hitchcock so seriously, he throws everything but the kitchen sink at the story in the form of split screens, split diopter shots, mirrors, POVs, fake outs, countless red herrings and numerous other tricks and gimmicks he has at his disposal. Just watch the extended, wordless sequence where Kate tracks her hopeful conquest through that art museum that sees her go through a whole gamut of emotions that takes in a lost glove, second thoughts and a thorough fingering in a taxi cab. Now that’s a rollercoaster.
On top of all this, the film straddles the 70s aesthetic with an 80s virtuosity that the director would spectacularly utilize to make Scarface – behold Dennis Franz’s detective who dresses like he’s policing at 9am but he has to porn at noon. Similarly, Michael Caine plays an amiable straight man to proceedings as the mild-mannered shrink who holds the key to everything and Dickinson makes the most of her cinematic fake-out before Nancy Allen’s investment obsessed prostitute and Keith Gordon’s vengeful teen tag in for the remainder.

While the movie flirts with misogyny just as much as it does with a skewed look a transgenderism (Kate is clearly being punished for the “crime” of wanting a more varied sex life), its more awkward stances actually heighten the messed up, exploitation nature of the entire film to near legendary levels. And if nothing else, the moment where Bobbi slowly moves her razor in line with a closing elevator door towards Liz’s helping hand truly does invokes Hitchcock at his most cruel. Y’know, if Hitch was up for going all out for very graphic sex and violence.
Lurid mission accomplished, then.

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