DRESSED TO KILL (1980) Review by Steve Kirkham

DRESSED TO KILL (1980)

4 stars
Arrow Video. Limited Edition 4K UHD. 3rd March

Back in the day I saw DRESSED TO KILL several times, but usually in various bits, as I was working at my local Odeon at the time – as it’s a film that has several standout sequences it didn’t really matter, with writer/director Brian De Palma operating at the height of his powers.

It opens with Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson, at the time best known as the star of the TV show POLICE WOMAN) having a steamy – in both senses of the word – shower, which is both erotic and shocking, with an obvious nod to Hitchcock. Dickinson did use a body double – Victoria Johnson – for the more explicit parts of this.

She speaks of her frustrations with her husband with her therapist Dr Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) and flirts with him – but he rejects her saying he is happily married. Due to spend the day with her nerdy son Peter (Keith Gordon), he is the middle of building some kind of computer, so she goes alone to the museum. What follows is another bravura section as she follows a mysterious stranger through the building and eventually hooks up with him in a taxi outside and ends up in his apartment for a tryst. She gets a shock later when she is gathering up her belongings to leave and finds a note from a clinic saying her liaison has venereal disease!

She is then (spoiler alert) brutally slashed to death with a straight razor, in the elevator of the building, by a tall blonde, wearing a black coat and sunglasses. Call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen, who was married to De Palma at the time) discovers the bloody body and spies the killer in the mirror of the lift. She soon finds herself a target for the murderer.

A sort of American giallo, this was clearly the director riffing on Hitch. It is full of great visual style, with prowling camerawork by cinematographer Ralf Bode, plus we get De Palma’s bag of tricks including split screen and the use of split diopter to keep two parts of an image in focus. Add to this the fabulous score by Pino Donnagio and you have the makings of a classic thriller which looks fantastic in 4K, even if the plot doesn’t always makes sense and the killer is perhaps a bit obvious. It should also be noted that some of the attitudes on show here might not fly with today’s audiences.

Steve Kirkham

EXTRAS
4 stars
Two audio commentaries – critics Drusilla Adeline and Joshua Conkel/critic Maitland McDonagh

Beyond Good and Evil – visual essay by critics BJ and Harmony Colangelo (11 mins)

The Empathy of Dressed to Kill – visual essay by critic Jessica Crets (9 mins)

Interviews from 2022 with actress Nancy Allen (17 mins), associate producer/production manager Fred C. Caruso (8 mins) and with actor Keith Gordon (14 mins)

Archival interviews with actors Angie Dickinson (29 mins), Nancy Allen (23 mins) and Keith Gordon (30 mins), and producer George Litto (17 mins).

The Making of a Thriller, an archival documentary on the making of the film (43 mins)

Censorship Comparison – Unrated, R-rated and TV-rated (5 mins)

Slashing Dressed to Kill, an archival featurette examining the changes made to avoid an X rating (9 mins)

Photo gallery and Theatrical trailer

Plus Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx and Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Sara Michelle Fetters, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Matthew Sorrento and Heather Wixson