Brian De Palma's Hitchcockian thriller starts off with a middle aged woman named Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) in the shower. She lathers up and shows off the goods, heads out into the bedroom, and then feigns her enjoyment as her husband mounts her. Her marriage is dead and she knows it, but at least she got a cool kid out of the deal in the form of science geek Peter (Keith Gordon). Later that day she heads to her shrink's office for her regular session with Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine). She does her best into trying to talk him into bed, but it's not going to happen, he tells her it's not worth risking his marriage over even if he does find her very attractive. Kate needs something though, so she heads to the art museum where she winds up hooking up with a guy, screwing around with him in a cab and then heading back to his place for some quality time in the bedroom. When she finishes up, she's brutally murdered in the building's elevator by a ‘blonde woman'… the only witnesses to this event being a hooker named Liz (Nancy Allan) and her john, who takes off never to be seen again.

The cops are called in, of course, and Detective Marino (Dennis Franz) figures Liz could very well be a suspect. Liz knows better, however, and decides to do a bit of snooping around on her own, and then eventually with some help from Peter. There's the matter of that blonde woman though, the one who hacked Kate up with a straight razor. She keeps leaving strange messages on Dr. Elliott's answering machine. Elliott suspects that the killer could be a former patient of his named Bobbie, but he's not saying much more than that.

Stylish, sexy and often downright sleazy, Dressed To Kill may borrow a lot from Hitchcock's Psycho and Dario Argento's giallo films but it does so with a good sense of fun and it remains an entertaining watch. While it's true that you won't have too much trouble figuring out who the killer is (in hindsight, they really didn't do a very good job of hiding it!) the film still gets by thanks to a couple of grisly murder set pieces (Dickinson's death is particularly nasty though again we think of Psycho as it's basically the shower scene relocated) and no shortage of skin on display. Whether it's the opening shower scene (which obviously uses a double as a stand in for Dickinson, as we never see her face connected to her naughty bits!) or Nancy Allan's black lingerie clad attempt to seduce Michael Caine, De Palma's movie makes sure that sex is at the front of the viewers mind from start, quite literally, until finish.

There's also a remarkably tense scene in which Nancy Allen's character arrives home only to notice that the blonde woman she believes to be the killer is waiting for her. This leads to a great chase around Manhattan and then into the New York City subway system. We won't ruin how it plays out as it's a highlight of the film but here De Palma shows us just how good he can be at building suspense and how he hasn't just aped Hitchcock's style at this point in his career but actually learned from it.

Performances are strong across the board with Dickinson in fine form as the distraught wife and Caine doing a fine job as the clinically inclined psychiatrist. Nancy Allen steals the show as the immensely likeable prostitute and her camaraderie with Keith Gordon works better than it has any right to. Dennis Franz basically plays the same curmudgeonly cop he's become typecast as but he does it well and if he's rough around the edges we know his character's heart is in the right place. As derivative as all of this might be, it's a fun movie and it holds up well.

Video:

Dressed To Kill is presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition framed at 2.35.1 widescreen. As has been mentioned in various outlets online, this transfer has some issues and as such, the release has been postponed from 7/29/15 to 9/8/15. There's already an exchange program being put into place for those who wind up with this version. What's wrong with it? Vertical stretching that makes everyone look a little taller and thinner than they should. The colors are also different here than what we've seen in the past, with things looking a little more green for some reason. Detail is good, but this transfer has framing problems. Good on Criterion for correcting it. Once a revised disc is made available we'll revisit this and update the video portion of this review accordingly but for now, the disc we have on hand doesn't properly represent what should wind up in your hands if you buy it. Criterion have stated that they will indicated which version is the corrected one by printing ‘Second Printing' on the back of the cover packaging.