It is difficult to know just how to judge Brian DePalma's films. He is undeniably talented, and is capable of creating masterful works of kitschy dark humor like CARRIE and THE PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, elegantly stylized suspense thrillers like OBSESSION and slick colorful popcorn epics like THE FURY and THE UNTOUCHABLES. Yet, much of his filmography is dominated by cheesy trash, marked by sloppy plotting, self-consciously showy set pieces and sometimes embarrassingly awkward drama. Often, too often, he focuses his attention on one or two sequences on which he can sate his penchant for flamboyant camera stunts and the rest of the film is slapped together with narratives and scenes that are as rickety as a rope suspension bridge from an old jungle movie.
His tendency to plagiarize, er, uh ... pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock is well known, but he is not all that discriminating in his thefts. He steals the set up for DRESSED TO KILL from Hitchcock's PSYCHO, imitates a bit of VERTIGO and even shoplifts from FAMILY PLOT, but the bulk of the film has no great respect for the master's work. It is like stealing the crown jewels to use the gems as trinkets on a dime store charm bracelet. The bits and pieces of Hitchcock that DePalma flashes on screen are meant to be nothing more than little trophies.
Like PSYCHO, the film is a two-part story; part one being a personal drama about a woman in emotional turmoil and the second half a thriller. But one of the reasons DRESSED TO KILL doesn't work is that DePalma doesn't seem to get what makes PSYCHO great and he totally fumbles act one. In PSYCHO, Hitchcock carefully structured the Janet Leigh story to be a compelling, self contained drama, separate, yet firmly connected to the Anthony Perkins thriller that followed. DRESSED TO KILL gives us this long and ultimately pointless shaggy dog act one involving Angie Dickinson as Kate Miller, a desperate housewife looking for some hot sex in the afternoon. DePalma has never shown any intrinsic gifts for comedy, yet he repeatedly goes for ill-considered humor to no real effect. When Kate serves up a smirky sexual innuendo to her teenage son, you can't help but cringe. Her discovery that she might have been exposed to a venereal disease seems aimed at getting a tasteless laugh, Even her lurid masochistic sex dream comes with a punchline.
The film treats Kate like a pathetic joke and introduces her to one humiliation after another, before disposing of her and her story entirely. Unlike Leigh's Marion Crane, Dickinson's Kate Miller is pitiable, but not very sympathetic. Despite a nice performance by Dickinson, her character is nothing more than a trivial plot device. Yet, this disposable beginning is the best thing about DRESSED TO KILL. Though it is treated with all the subtlety of second-rate soft-core porn, this part of the film at least provides some guilty pleasure sleaziness to it. When the film gets to its slasher movie core, DePalma clumsily stitches together a lame series of sequences involving a cross-dressing killer, improbable coincidences and a vaguely homophobic plot littered with treacherously illogical holes and punctuated with embarrassingly bad dialogue. And the less said the better about the almost comatose performance by Michael Caine as a compromised psychiatrist and the creepy work of Dennis Franz in what would be the first of many stereotyping roles as a vulgar, unpleasant police detective.
When the film came out in 1980, it was greeted with mixed reviews, though a good number of top critics embraced it on purely stylistic grounds. And on one viewing, without much time for thought, the film moves along nicely if improbably from one contrived moment to the next. But great, or even good thrillers should be able to endure repeated viewings; knowing all a film's secrets should not lessen the enjoyment of watching it more than once. Indeed, the more a film like PSYCHO reveals about itself the more there is for the viewer to enjoy. But the striptease that DRESSED TO KILL does over repeated viewings only prompts the viewer to see that the pseudo-sophisticated style DePalma drapes over his tale is only meant to hide an already lifeless mannequin.
His tendency to plagiarize, er, uh ... pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock is well known, but he is not all that discriminating in his thefts. He steals the set up for DRESSED TO KILL from Hitchcock's PSYCHO, imitates a bit of VERTIGO and even shoplifts from FAMILY PLOT, but the bulk of the film has no great respect for the master's work. It is like stealing the crown jewels to use the gems as trinkets on a dime store charm bracelet. The bits and pieces of Hitchcock that DePalma flashes on screen are meant to be nothing more than little trophies.
Like PSYCHO, the film is a two-part story; part one being a personal drama about a woman in emotional turmoil and the second half a thriller. But one of the reasons DRESSED TO KILL doesn't work is that DePalma doesn't seem to get what makes PSYCHO great and he totally fumbles act one. In PSYCHO, Hitchcock carefully structured the Janet Leigh story to be a compelling, self contained drama, separate, yet firmly connected to the Anthony Perkins thriller that followed. DRESSED TO KILL gives us this long and ultimately pointless shaggy dog act one involving Angie Dickinson as Kate Miller, a desperate housewife looking for some hot sex in the afternoon. DePalma has never shown any intrinsic gifts for comedy, yet he repeatedly goes for ill-considered humor to no real effect. When Kate serves up a smirky sexual innuendo to her teenage son, you can't help but cringe. Her discovery that she might have been exposed to a venereal disease seems aimed at getting a tasteless laugh, Even her lurid masochistic sex dream comes with a punchline.
The film treats Kate like a pathetic joke and introduces her to one humiliation after another, before disposing of her and her story entirely. Unlike Leigh's Marion Crane, Dickinson's Kate Miller is pitiable, but not very sympathetic. Despite a nice performance by Dickinson, her character is nothing more than a trivial plot device. Yet, this disposable beginning is the best thing about DRESSED TO KILL. Though it is treated with all the subtlety of second-rate soft-core porn, this part of the film at least provides some guilty pleasure sleaziness to it. When the film gets to its slasher movie core, DePalma clumsily stitches together a lame series of sequences involving a cross-dressing killer, improbable coincidences and a vaguely homophobic plot littered with treacherously illogical holes and punctuated with embarrassingly bad dialogue. And the less said the better about the almost comatose performance by Michael Caine as a compromised psychiatrist and the creepy work of Dennis Franz in what would be the first of many stereotyping roles as a vulgar, unpleasant police detective.
When the film came out in 1980, it was greeted with mixed reviews, though a good number of top critics embraced it on purely stylistic grounds. And on one viewing, without much time for thought, the film moves along nicely if improbably from one contrived moment to the next. But great, or even good thrillers should be able to endure repeated viewings; knowing all a film's secrets should not lessen the enjoyment of watching it more than once. Indeed, the more a film like PSYCHO reveals about itself the more there is for the viewer to enjoy. But the striptease that DRESSED TO KILL does over repeated viewings only prompts the viewer to see that the pseudo-sophisticated style DePalma drapes over his tale is only meant to hide an already lifeless mannequin.