Dressed to Kill

Saw Dressed to Kill, a Brian De Palma film about a serial killer who is hunting this high-class prostitute who is the only witness to live. It's a somewhat sleazy film in the style of the Italian giallo films - lots of leggy murder victims and the terminology of psychology randomly bandied about to serve as motivation. It's pretty compelling stuff, but if you know anything about psychology or how human beings behave, just be sure to check your brain at the door.

There's a sequence here a boy genius sets up a camera to film people coming out of a building throughout the day. Apparently a young De Palma actually did this at the request of his mom who thought his dad was cheating on her. I feel this anecdote kind of explains De Palma's comfort with some low-level sleaze and porn-like assumption that everyone is down for a good time and probably up to no good. In this film, indeed, a woman is seduced via an elaborate game of hide-and-seek in an art museum. It's sort of sexy but also sort of stilted. I kept thinking of porn and I wasn't sure why.

Anyway, the film is good fun. It's a little slow at parts, like a Colombo episode or something: very deliberately paced and focused on resolving the mystery. In this way it's kind of dated, but it's also very stylish and cool in its 70s-ish way and delivers on the giallo promise of raving schizophrenics and mincing sex maniacs (!!) All in all a fun film, but a little long in the tooth.