Brian DePalma's Dressed to Kill (1980): "It's Just So Dirty"

Dressed to Kill is a lurid and self-conscious thriller, director Brian DePalma's 1980 riff on even more Hitchcock tropes, dressed up as high art. Mostly vulgarizing Hitchcock for the excessive style-over-substance cocaine '80s, you can sense the sleaze dripping off every frame, and not in an appreciatively over-the-top manner but in a let-me-rub-your-face-in-filth way. It has more in common with the Italian thrillers known as giallos, as it's more concerned with formal, stylized cinematic tricks than story, character, human insight or motivation. As for the plot, cf. Psycho.

I certainly have no problem with sleaze or exploitation, etc., but when it's made by a major director (at least he was when he made this) I expect a little more finesse, substance, and irony rather than just amping up a then-20-year-old Hitchcock movie. At times it's a fun sleazy thriller, fizzy and intriguing at first, but it goes flat fast as the cheesy Herrmann ripoff score blows on and on, the silly twists, lots of sexual violence, and at the very end, when DePalma rips off his own Carrie.

"It's just so dirty," says perky prostitute Nancy Allen to psychiatrist Michael Caine. What is Allen talking about? An unexpectedly satisfying afternoon with a john? A sexual fantasy, something she thinks will arouse Caine? A blue movie she saw in Times Square? No, she's talking about a dream she's had - although she's making it up - about being raped with a straight razor.

Dude, what? Razor rape is not something I think of as "dirty." Okay, DePalma, what the hell? You wrote the screenplay, those are your words...

Some very good scenes transcend the pulpiness, of course, which is what gives this movie at least somewhat of a reputation three decades later. What are these enjoyable, brilliantly-crafted sequences? DePalma's use of split screen, and even split/split screen, is engaging, which he stretches nearly to the point of distraction, and then switches back to a single point-of-view. Voyeurism - I get it!I'm thinking of the now-famous art museum chase/seduction, or when Caine and Allen are in their respective homes and we learn about their lives and interests. There's a nice bit when the anticipation of a telephone ringing would shatter our nerves. The murder of Angie Dickinson's character, and then Allen's discovery of it, is terrifically, terrifyingly, framed.

But it's nearly indescribable how poorly this movie has aged. Misogyny, racism, gender identity politics: how could DePalma have gotten everything so wrong? Even insane asylum inmates come off poorly! It's not so much that he deals with these things - Taxi Driver certainly does - it's that you can't tell if he's serious or just smirky. The movie is smooth and assured but it's (mostly) a polished turd. So much of the movie is couched in dream and fantasy so DePalma can have his cake and eat it too, like those biblical epics of decades that past that promised the walls of Jericho would come down, but not before lots of Israelite ladies showed some skin. Every woman must pay in this uptown slasher flick.

I think DePalma was just clueless about his lack of taste and just going through stylistic motions, and inadvertently created a noxious stew of outrageous and ugly prejudices. Rape fantasies have particularly disappeared from pop art because they're just so... wrong. There's practically no way they can be presented as artistic or insightful before you gross out most of your audience. Tastes have obviously changed, so this could be a tough movie to revisit unless you're a fan of the incongruity of what was once considered acceptable entertainment but which now tastes like, well, a polished turd.

Italian Horror Blogathon: Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (1979)

Italian horror movies of the 1970s and early 1980s are a mixed bag of delight and frustration. They gleefully rip off popular American movies (Jaws, Dawn of the Dead, The Exorcist, Alien, etc.), amp up the blood and gore and music and intensity, but mostly fall flat because they can't be concerned with plot, dialogue, characterization, good production values, etc. But we love them because of these charming flaws, not in spite of them!

For me, the essential '70s Italian horror movie is Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (known in the US as simply Zombie), a 1979 rip-off "sequel" to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which was known to the Continent as Zombi. Now, Dawn gets all the love, which it deserves because it is truly groundbreaking, but Zombi 2 is pretty much my favorite Italian horror movie and zombie movie. It has stuff Dawn does not: disgustingly wormy, squishy, rotting zombies; a mad scientist on a deserted Caribbean island not unlike Dr. Moreau; and an air of grim desolation I find much more appropriate to the proceedings than the cheeky satire of Romero's film.

How is Zombi 2 representative of Italian horror? First, it comes complete with bad dubbing and wooden acting. Yes, that is Mia Farrow's sister Tisa in the lead, which hilariously puts Woody Allen well within six degrees of separation from exploitative Italian horror movies. American and English actors down on their luck often turned up in these flicks. I don't think they expected to be part of a cult movie history. Ian McCullough, seen above, turns in an audio commentary on the DVD and he states he has never seen the movie.

Then there's an astonishing underwater zombie-versus-shark scene (every movie, TV show, or cartoon in the five or so years post Jaws had to have a shark in it somewhere). This sequence is, I believe, literally a cinematic one-of-a-kind! And the zombies themselves are Spanish conquistadors who we see rise from their graves in the jungle in the middle of the day. Very effective. Also it's a great example of Italian horror's love of inept, nonsensical ideas: how do corpses hundreds of years dead bleed a gout of fresh blood?

There's infamous eye violence sequence (a staple in Fulci's movies – Luis Bunuel had nothing on him) followed by a glorious tableaux of gore as the zombies devour their eye-penetrated victim, accompanied by the infamous and clumsy zoom shot so beloved of Italian horror filmmakers. Overall, though, it's the ridiculously, gloriously over-the-top gore that makes this a classic of its genre.

When I first saw Zombi 2 I was probably 15 or 16 – the perfect age to appreciate such shenanigans – when my friends and I had the habit of renting the nastiest-looking foreign horror videos, which usually had a thin patina of dust upon them. I was reintroduced to it at a 4th of July party about 7 or 8 years ago where I'd indulged a bit too much to be social, so I wandered into the empty living room, where I found, to my surprise, a nice remastered VHS copy. Delighted to be acquainted with an old friend, I put it on, finding it perfect for the condition I was in.

Other party-goers would wander in, chat a moment during one of the dull parts (which are plentiful in Italian horror), drawn by that implacable score, and then suddenly be gob-smacked (the ones not used to Italian horror movies, anyway) by a scene of unremitting violence and dubbing ineptitude. This is an Italian horror WIN.

The movie's climax is like an early Lovecraft story ("Argh! Aaack! They've got me!") but it works in a fun, satisfying way. But its implications are inescapable: there is no transcendence here. Bodies are consumed, brains displayed, blood is merely an appetizer; eyes, once windows to the soul, are now squeezed tight in shock and fear and ultimately penetrated to reveal no soul whatsoever. Romero's vision of the zombie invasion has people finding their common humanity; when Fulci's zombipocalypse arrives, we find we are meat, and nothing besides.

Note: This post is my contribution to the ITALIAN HORROR BLOGATHON.


Note: This post is ALSO my contribution to the COUNTDOWN TO HALLOWEEN.