Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 44 No. 5. March 30 1981
Film — Fatal fashion — Dressed to Kill
Film
Fatal fashion
Dressed to Kill
After last weeks visit to The Shining, we were adamant that we would never, ever review a scary movie again. Owing to circumstances beyond our control, we are now in a position to do some sort of a review of Mr De Palma's Dressed To Kill. Despite anything you may have heard to the contrary, this is not a terror movie; it is better described as a thriller with pretensions; rather than inviting comparison with Kubrick's Shining, it aspires to be a latter-day Psycho, and fails admirably. Some of De Palma's attempts to emulate the 'Master' are downright painful, such as the long sequence in which Angie Dickinson on the make tries to pick up a guy in an art gallery. The sequence is silent apart from a particularly uninspired music score, and goes on like this for about five minutes. But you cannot emulate Hitch's genius for letting the camera tell the story merely by eschewing dialogue, and in Dressed To Kill this sequence comes across more as a stylised courtship ballet than as a real human encounter. This, indeed, is the 'De Palma touch'; the whole film gives an impression of distance and stylisation. Whereas Hitchcock's roaming camera enhances the story-line, De Palma's seems to solicit admiration of its elegance and cleverness. Each sequence shouts self-consciously 'Look at this, and this, and this; I did it all myself, aren't I clever.' The production is obtrusively artificial and slick; every murderous razor gleams as if it has been polished with Pledge, every pose to be carefully casual. The whole thing has a chocolate-box air about it.
Fake Chocolate
And what's inside the chocolate box? Sadly, a soft centre. The plot is magnificently inane, wandering about aimlessly, killing off the main character at the end of the first half, and having its most satisfactory sequence in a dream!! This went out with the ark; the plot proper ends at 9.45pm when the murderer gets packed off to a looney-bin, and then there's a whole half-hour sequence when he escapes and comes to do his captors in, that transpires to be a nightmare. It's as if De Palma ran out of things to say and needed an extra couple of thousand feet to make a commercially marketable product, so he tacked this bit on; ironically it provides the only two exciting bits in the whole movie. About the only intriguing thing is how he managed to get two reasonable performers (Angie Dickinson and Michael Caine) to have anything to do with such a turkey, and how he managed to get two such lacklustre performances out of them.
Why indeed?
Basically, if you want to go to the movies, avoid this one and go and see The Shining or Goodbye Pork Pie or anything. Something to bear in mind is that every Sunday night they show neat double features in most of the city cinemas; these are really good. Not only is there usually something worth seeing, but also it's damned good value; for three dollars you get two movies and none of those godawful featurettes. In fact, why bother ever going to the movies during the week again?
SD & HM