Dressed to Kill (1980 film)

Dressed to Kill premiered in Los Angeles and New York City on July 25, 1980.[1] The film grossed $3,416,000 in its opening weekend from 591 theatres and improved its gross the following weekend with $3,640,000 from 596 theatres.[9] It grossed a total of $31.9 million at the U.S. box office, and was the 21st highest-grossing film of the year.[3]

Dressed to Kill currently holds an 80% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 49 reviews, with an average rating of 6.52/10. The consensus states, "With arresting visuals and an engrossingly lurid mystery, Dressed to Kill stylishly encapsulates writer-director Brian De Palma's signature strengths."[10]

Roger Ebert awarded the film three stars out of four, stating "the museum sequence is brilliant" and adding: "Dressed to Kill is an exercise in style, not narrative; it would rather look and feel like a thriller than make sense, but DePalma has so much fun with the conventions of the thriller that we forgive him and go along."[11] Gene Siskel also gave it three stars out of four, writing that there were scenes "that are as exciting and as stylish as any ever put on film. Unfortunately, a good chunk of the film is a whodunit, and its mystery is so easy to solve that we merely end up watching the film's visual pyrotechnics at a distance, never getting all that involved."[12] Vincent Canby of The New York Times] called the film "witty, romantic," and "very funny, which helps to defuse the effect of the graphically photographed violence. In addition, the film is, in its own inside-out way, peculiarly moral." His review added that "The performers are excellent, especially Miss Dickinson."[13] Variety declared "Despite some major structural weaknesses, the cannily manipulated combination of mystery, gore and kinky sex adds up to a slick commercial package that stands to draw some rich blood money." [14] David Denby of New York Magazine proclaimed the film "the first great American movie of the '80s."[4]

Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times wrote "The brilliance of Dressed to Kill is apparent within seconds of its opening gliding shot; it is a sustained work of terror—elegant, sensual, erotic, bloody, a directorial tour de force."[15] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker stated of De Palma that "his timing is so great that when he wants you to feel something he gets you every time. His thriller technique, constantly refined, has become insidious, jewelled. It's hardly possible to find a point at which you could tear yourself away from this picture."[16] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "This elegant new murder thriller promises to revive the lagging summer box office and enhance De Palma's reputation as the most exciting and distinctive manipulator of suspense since Alfred Hitchcock."[17] In his movie guide, Leonard Maltin gave the film 3 1/2 stars out of four, calling it a "High-tension melodrama", and stating "De Palma works on viewers' emotions, not logic, and maintains a fever pitch from start to finish." He also praised Pino Donaggio's "chilling music score."[18]

John Simon of the National Review, after taking note of the two-page advertisements full of superlatives in The New York Times, wrote "What Dressed to Kill dispenses liberally, however, is sophomoric soft-core pornography, vulgar manipulation of the emotions for mere sensation, salacious but inept dialogue that is a cross between comic-strip Freudianism and sniggering double entendres, and a plot line so full of holes to be at best a dotted line".[19]

During the film's initial release, the activist group Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media distributed a leaflet denouncing the film's misogynistic and transphobic attitudes, arguing that "The distorted image of a psychotic male transvestite [sic] makes all sexual minorities appear sick and dangerous.”[20] Numerous critics have since placed Dressed to Kill in a lineage of slasher movies that perpetuate the transphobic myth that trans people are mentally-ill sexual predators.[21][20][22][23][24] Dressed to Kill was featured in the 2020 documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen; in a 2020 reappraisal of the film for The Guardian, the critic Scott Tobias referred to De Palma's understanding of trans issues as "disconcertingly retrograde....There's no getting around the ugly association of gender transition with violence, other than to say that it feels thoroughly aestheticized".[25]

In a 2016 interview, De Palma said, "I don't know what the transgender community would think [of the film now]....Obviously I realize that it’s not good for their image to be transgender and also be a psychopathic murderer. But I think that [perception] passes with time. We’re in a different time." He added that he was "glad" that the film had become "a favorite of the gay community," which he attributed to its "flamboyance".[26]

Two versions of the film exist in North America, an R-rated version and an unrated version. The unrated version is around 30 seconds longer and shows more pubic hair in the shower scene, more blood in the elevator scene (including a close-up shot of the killer slitting Kate's throat), and more explicit dialogue from Liz during the scene in Elliott's office. These scenes were trimmed when the MPAA originally gave the film an X rating.[27]

The film is currently owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (successor to Orion Pictures, who bought Filmways and American International Pictures in 1982). The film saw a 1984 VHS release by Warner Home Video, and later another VHS release by Goodtimes under licence from Orion. In 2002, MGM released the film on DVD, including special features. In 2010, MGM released both R-rated and unrated versions on DVD and Blu-ray. The Criterion Collection released a deluxe Blu-ray edition of the film on September 8, 2015.[28]