#VICTORIA JOHNSON DRESSED TO KILL MOVIE#

Prior to that, it's all trashy psychology and grimy amateur detective work on the filthy streets of New York, which De Palma and cinematographer Ralf D. Or anyway, the first 94-odd minutes of that 104-minute running time do, prior to the awful, unforced error of a protracted 'the end - or is it (yes it is (but isssss ittttt))' closing sequence. Any film this unapologetically gross and lurid is damn sure going to be at least watchable, and the 104-minute running time zips right on by. None of which means that Dressed to Kill is a hard, esoteric watch. On top of that, De Palma obviously built Dressed to Kill as a sandbox to try different ways of staging thriller sequences, and you can almost sense in the midst of watching it exactly what set of parameters he was activating: here's the one where we'll manipulate viewer knowledge by placing the camera here and editing to these shots, here's the one where we'll shift perspective by cutting out the sound and re-orienting around a different set of characters, here's the one where. Both films are openly experiments, with Dressed to Kill trying a bit more rigorously to tease out the dramaturgical implications of what that shift in context means (it is not, after all, borrowing Psycho's plot, only the ingredients of its plot), but sill ending up in a fairly chilly, programmatic place. The only film to more thoroughly strip-mine Hitchcock's Psycho Gus Van Sant's 1998 Psycho remake, and I rather feel that De Palma's motivations and Van Sant's were about on par: let's see what happens if we re-do this material in a new context.

Pino Donaggio's score even replicates Bernard Herrmann's idea of having the music 'stab' the viewer's ears at the point that the sudden death of our presumptive protagonist drops the bottom out of the story partway through. It's one of the most overt of De Palma's 'look at me, I'm a cinephile' homages to Alfred Hitchcock, and especially to Psycho, a film from which it openly borrows enormous chunks of its plot and narrative structure.

#VICTORIA JOHNSON DRESSED TO KILL MOVIE#

It is, however, a movie that's all ticking mechanical brain, and no heart, nor burning loins. In fact, Dressed to Kill, despite what I've just implied, isn't a bad movie. There's nothing wrong, by the way, with not caring about sex and still wanting to make an erotic thriller. In unfairness to him, what he initially wanted to open with was extremely bad). (In fairness to De Palma, he initially didn't want to open the film this way. The point, anyway, is that Dressed to Kill opens with a masturbation scene - specifically a masturbation dream sequence, as it will very shortly turn out that Kate is stalled in a loveless marriage filled with bad sex, and horny fantasies are her only outlet - and the only reason to do that in a film is because A) you want to have it be known immediately, far and wide, that this is going to be a deep-down sleazy, intensely focused, boundary-pushing wallow in the extremes of human sexuality, and B) you absolutely do not care in the slightest about sex. The breasts and pubic hair aren't Dickinson's, by the way they belong to Victoria Lynn Johnson, an occasional Penthouse model. release from 1980, and so on, and you get the idea. And then another cut, to the exact maximum amount of female pubic hair you get to show in a commercial U.S. And then we cut, and the frame is just, like. It starts with a married couple: he, the nameless and quite disposable husband, is a fit middle-aged man standing shirtless as he glances over at the see-through shower door she, the wife, Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) sees him watching her and is instantly turned on, rubbing her whole body as she smiles back at him. By this standard, Brian De Palma's 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill is the least-pornographic film ever made. There is a truism, one I've mentioned a few times here and there, that despite what you might think, no film which opens with a sex scene can be considered pornographic, because a good pornographer knows the importance of making the viewer wait for it. A review requested by WBTN, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.ĭo you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!

Victoria johnson dressed to kill