Dressed to Kill | | Cast : | Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson | | Director : | Brian De Palma | | Studio : | Mgm/Ua Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | June 23, 1980 | | DVD Released Date : | May 06, 2003 | | Language : | Unknown (Dubbed), English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), English (Original Language), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 24, 2005 | | Summary | Dressed to Kill | Content
 | "A sustained work of terror-elegant, sensual, erotic, bloody!De Palma never lets up! A directorial tour de force!"-Los Angeles Times
Writer/director Brian De Palma "maintains a fever pitch from start to finish" with this steamily libidinous and extremely bloody thriller. Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson and Nancy Allen star in this psycho-sexual chiller and its razor-sharp tale of passion, madness and murder that is scary and suspenseful.
Fashionable Manhattan therapist Dr. Robert Elliot (Caine) faces the most terrifying moment of his life, when a psychotic killer begins attacking the women in his life (Dickinson & Allen)-with a straight razor stolen from his office. Desperate to find the murderer before anyone else is hurt, Elliott is soon drawn into a dark and disturbing world of chilling desires. And as the doctor edges closer to the terrible truth, he finds himself lost in a provocative and deadly maze of obsession, deviance and deceit-where the most harmless erotic fantasies...can become the most deadly sexual nightmares!
I highly recommend adding this DVD to your collection. |
| Rating | | | Date | August 23, 2005 | | Summary | A classic of the suspense in the eighties! | Content
| If we drew a straight line between Hitchcock and his most remarkable followers two names: Claude Chabrol in France and Brian de Palma and weaving finer we should agree that Dressed is the best and most mature film of De Palma.
Evidently there are more than happy coincidence respect top previous Hitchcock entries. First at all Angie Dickinson has committed an unforgettable sin, she has infringed adultery and now like Leigh in Psycho she will have the weight of the guilt with her early death, curiously by the same sin.
The first part of the film concludes with her murderer, brilliantly made with a superb slow motion and astonishing handle camera.
The psychopath is a twist of Norman Bates. Two crossed and antagonist personalities living in the same body. Opposite sides of the same coin facing one each other and trying to maintain a fragile equilibrium, as we will see.
In the other hand we have a Peeping Tom but smartly embodied by a nerd: a brilliant electronic student who will become eventually in the target of funny double jokes.
But the main character is Nancy Allen that made an accurate role ( the best in her career) as charismatic and sympathetic pros who will be the hook and future victim of her dangerous game in her particular search of the assassin.
The script is smart and in despite of the fact more than twenty have elapsed, the movie maintains its febrile tension.
An undeniable triumph of de Palma, without forgetting obviously the fantastic performance of Michael Caine who lived his Golden Decade in the eighties: Educating Rita, Hanna and her sisters,
Mona Lisa and this one. He had to win at least another additional Award with Mona Lisa, too.
Watch it over and over and you will always find traces of good cinema. That' s a good signal and the best evidence we are in front of one of the four best suspense movies of the eighties.
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| Rating | | | Date | August 04, 2005 | | Summary | 3.85 STARS: A very good Hitchcockian styled thriller/hybrid horror flick. | Content
| Brian De Palma's "Dressed to Kill" is a very good suspense thriller/horror movie. The similarities between "Dressed to Kill" and Alfred Hitchcock's psycho are clear and well defined. "Dressed to Kill" starts out with a sexually unsatisfied middle aged woman who sees a psychiatrist played by Michael Caine. The woman struggles with her sexual worth and displays a reckless attitude in a chance encounter with some stranger at a museum.
De Palma, like Hitchcock, uses classic cinematic misdirection to fool the audience into perhaps thinking that the middle aged woman is the main character and her emotional problems are central to the movie's plot. So, what De Palma sets up to be as a drama and maybe even a love story turns into something darker and horrifying. Out of the blue comes a brutal murder that shocks the audience and changes the focus and expectations of the audience into what could have been a drama focused on a middle aged woman dealing with problems regarding her sexuality to a suspense thriller which is styled like a hybrid horror movie. The result is a very effective movie which truly shocks the consciousness of the audience and creates a terrific little mystery for the audience to put together.
The question in this movie becomes who is the murderer and what was the motive...De Palma hypnotizes the audience into a psychological thriller delving into the horrifying world of the unconscious mind, classic psychosis and multiple personality disorder. Indeed, De Palma borrows heavily from Hitchcock with overtones of "Psycho" and other Hitchcock films to create an interesting movie that is able to stand on its own merits despite strong reliance on Hitchcockian techniques and style. Still, "Dressed to Kill" has that clearly dream like De Palma signature to it which is classic De Palma. The movie moves along with a murder mystery and De Palma provides the audience with another horrifying surprise or two to make "Dressed to Kill" into a clearly enjoyable horror movie viewing experience.
While not a classic nor a pure horror movie, "Dressed to Kill" is a must own hybrid horror movie that I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys Hitchcockian styled suspense thrillers with an element of horror to it...you won't be disappointed. "Dressed to Kill" is almost a FOUR STAR movie in my opinion, but if you have read any of my reviews, you will know that 3.85 STARS is an excellent grade coming from this reviewer. |
| Rating | | | Date | August 02, 2005 | | Summary | De Palma's mastery of the craft | Content
| There are sequences in DRESSED TO KILL that may be as formally accomplished as any film sequences ever made. The scene in the police station, with multiple framings and glass partitions mirroring De Palma's use of the split screen in other sequences (and with the characters secretly eavesdropping and spying on one another while being oblivious to how they are being spied on by others) is a virtuoso example, but the most stunning--and the most famous--may be Angie Dickinson's cruising sequence in the museum, with Dickinson lured and teased by a mysterious man with whom she's flirting. Although this was a big hit when released, DRESSED TO KILL has not sustained its reputation quite so much over the years as much as other De Palma films have, such as CARRIE and THE UNTOUCHABLES and even SISTERS. In part this may be because the homages to Hitchcock in this film are a bit TOO over the top, even for De Palma. (The dream sequence at the end, as beautifully accomplished as it is, was a mistake to include after the similar dream sequence ending CARRIE.) It's also hurt by the feeble acting of Nancy Allen, De Palma's Tippi Hedren and wife at the time: although memorable as the spoiled beauty queen in CARRIE, Allen just didn't have the chops to compete onscreen with Michael Caine or, particularly, the astonishing Dickinson, who gives a superbly nuanced and sympathetic performance as the lonely aging beauty despite the fact that she has so few lines in the first half of the film. But the great technical virtuosity of this film carries all before it: no one can play with multiple points of view like De Palma can, and his very jokey script allows him numerous opportunities to play hilariously mean pranks on his characters.
This edition of the film comes with a fine featurette with Keith Gordon, who plays the teenage hero of the film, analyzing De Palma's techniques in this film with genuien insight; it also has another featurette that seems like a real mistake about the controversies surrounding the film's release, with De Palma still bitterly whining about accusations at the time of the film's putative misogyny and sensationalism (given his spectacular subsequent career in Hollywood, and the film's financial success when it was released, his grousing seems churlish). |
| Rating | | | Date | May 25, 2005 | | Summary | Good DePalma Thriller | Content
| Jaded as many may aspire to be, I think all the panning in the world isn't going to negate the fact that Brian DePalma is talented. He leans towards bad taste with gratuitous female nudity and gore (as in Italian giallos), but he makes it up by his wonderful stylish compositions, camerawork and usually solid characters. His homages to Hitchcock are obvious, but he does succeed in creating his own unique type of film, using classical/classy soundtracks (like Hitchcock) to add mood and injecting metaphors, imagery, color and wonderful cat-and-mouse sequences to keep things entertaining. Here Pino Donaggio's score adds enormously to the striking visuals.
Angie Dickinson is Kate Miller, the frustrated housewife, who has an ill-fated affair with a mysterious man she meets at an art museum (a great sequence). Michael Caine is her psychiatrist, Dr. Elliot, and when Miller is brutally murdered in an elevator (the murderer resembles Karen Black's character in "Family Plot"), Miller's computer nerd son Peter (Keith Gordon) teams with Liz (Nancy Allen), the prostitute who was a witness of sorts, to track down the killer.
This film is loads of fun, in spite of some squeamish scenes and a few implausibilities. The amateur sleuths are enjoyable, the voyeurism, the use of color, sequences told completely by visuals, and an element of camp with the split screen sequences are all delicious. Angie Dickinson makes an attractive and likeable heroine (dispatched within the first half hour) and the cast is fun. Interestingly, this film was graced with some good extras (one never knows which films will get 'em and which won't) like the documentary about the making of "Dressed to Kill." In that extra, Angie Dickinson, in particular, comes off as a good-natured and unpretentious kind of gal. It particularly tickled me when she said that when making movies, you always feel "like a jerk" since you're doing what someone else tells you to do and saying lines that someone else has written, so she was glad to have contributed one moment: writing "pick up turkey" on a notepad in the museum. |
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