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:

Note that the original Criterion Blu-ray release of Dressed To Kill suffered from some vertical stretching that makes everyone look a little taller and thinner than they should. The disc's street date was changed and the transfer was corrected. You can identify the corrected version by looking at the back of the case below the UPC code where the text ‘Second Printing' is found at the bottom of the legalese paragraph. This indicates that it is the corrected version.

On this edition the movie is presented in AVC encoded 1080p high definition framed at 2.35.1 widescreen and the stretching issue is nowhere to be seen. The colors on this second pressing appear to be the same as on the first one, so there are some scenes that look a little more green then they did on the first Blu-ray release from MGM (and this looks to have more to do with the lighting than any sort of color tinting), but this is a director approved transfer scanned in 4k from the original negative, which makes it hard to argue with now that the framing is resolved. Detail is typically excellent here, though some shots do use soft focus and as such, they don't look quite as impressive in that regard as other shots do (nor should they). Contrast looks really solid here too. Skin tones look great, there are no problems with any compression artifacts and the image is free of any noise reduction. There isn't any serious print damage to note and outside of the occasional small speck, the image is very clean and shows good clarity and depth.