Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 21: Dressed to Kill
Much like any Brian De Palma film, Dressed to Kill is an exhilarating rollercoaster of twists and turns. Much like Brian De Palma's filmography, it's also a bit hit-and-miss.
I'm gonna start with the bad, just to get it out of the way. This 1980 movie has very dated views on several things, despite not being made all that long ago. The plot heavily involves transsexuality, and while they bother to show one transsexual person being interviewed, the large majority is showcasing it as a mental illness and something to be feared. There's also a racist group of thugs dressed like the cast of Fat Albert that harass a white female character, which gives off some serious Birth of a Nation vibes. It also paints people with mental illness as automatically dangerous and scary, which isn't exactly fair.
Moving onto the good, I love how the movie is nearly impossible to predict. Something exciting and wild happens in nearly every scene, almost like De Palma purposefully tried to surprise himself every time he sat down to write the movie. It has more than a passing resemblance to Psycho, complete with a beginning mislead, an over-explanation of what happened at the end, and a shower kill. It's clear the De Palma was trying to rattle the audience in the same way Hitchcock so famously did. While it's certainly inspired by Hitchcock, it's also unmistakably De Palma, especially in the visuals. Split screens, sweeping crane shots, fun oners, his trademarks are there from top to bottom.
I picked this movie because it's in the Criterion Collection and Edgar Wright recommended it, so I feel like it's worth mentioning that Michael Caine at one point yells "You don't have to be a detective to figure that out!", which Simon Pegg also yells in Hot Fuzz. Figuring out references in reverse like that is always fun.
As long as you accept that it's dated and has problems, it's worth seeing for its impeccable filmmaking and storytelling techniques.
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