Yet another example of Brian De Palma’s deep fear and resulting hatred of women. Dressed to Kill centers around psychiatrist Robert Elliott (Michael Caine), whose shaving razor is stolen by a troubled patient and put to gory use against various women. It’s a mystery, sort of – your first guess as to the identity of the killer likely will be the right one, despite De Palma’s silly attempts to throw you off the trail – but mostly a revealing look at the writer-director’s hysterical view of the female sex. Sex is the key word here, for that’s about all a woman in a De Palma film is good for. The first third of Dressed to Kill is devoted to the carnal degradation of Angie Dickinson as a a neglected housewife and one of Elliott’s patients. Once the killings get under way, Dressed to Kill sets its attention on the junior-detective investigation of a hooker (Nancy Allen) and a teen computer geek (Keith Gordon as the embarrassing De Palma stand-in). There are maybe two of the effective suspense sequences that De Palma always delivers – he’s regularly dismissed as an Alfred Hitchcock copycat, and indeed this has a whiff of Psycho – but they’re not nearly enough to temper the tasteless misogyny everywhere else on the screen.
