nudity as a mission statement (for better or worse), a weapon. i’ve heard and read many opinions that these things are better left implied and not shown… and true, there are remarkable instruments in restraint and creative side steps. the way i see it, however, is that brian de palma is the luckiest of all alfred hitchcock’s spiritual successors because he a) is one of the very few people capable of adapting the suspense master’s craft to his own tastes to the level that a de palma film is immediately recognisable as a de palma film, and b) had/has the more liberal film scene to accommodate for absolute perversion and fascination over a woman’s body. just look at the opening salvo — a wide stretch of mainly silence, visual whispers of celluloid as it invites you into a world of decadence and vile hatred. i see the very opening shower sequence as… as a boulder dropped in a lake to create ripples, a template & taster for what’s to come… and oh boy, does the film serve up all the sensual glee and bloody fun it promises. 

  the ripples create waves, and those waves manifest as camera movements as smooth as butter, split diopters (which is to de palma what the rko is to randy orton), and gorgeous technicolor. nancy allen and angie dickinson are bathed in the most beautiful lights, almost like angels in hell, and hell is shrouded in indecipherable lights and rough inhabitants. all throughout, a scent of sex — that pungent, irresistible perfume that de palma sprays around to show us his vision of sexual attraction as karma; it can be used against your foes, and it will bite you in the arse one day. brilliantly crafted, and utterly hateful. to be transgender here is to be struck with disease, to be locked up and institutionalised. an awful streak that runs through Dressed to Kill like a crown of barbed wire. it’s a deeply bittersweet feeling, then, to see a trans woman get the upper hand by becoming an eternal mental haunting — but to be trans starts and ends as something to be scared of, and that’s a mark of shame de palma’s film will carry to the end of its days.