Word: hitchcocked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dirty blond wig, wielding a straightrazor. The story proper is too silly to waste space explaining. You get a sharp sense of the confusion at the film's center when you realize that DePalma plundered the plot, the essential development of jolts, twists and red herrings, from Hitchcock's Psycho. There are two shower sequences, and a murder in an elevator--which is pretty much like a shower--and a number of clever, knowing spoofs, but most of the Hitchcock parallels, if you care to match them up, are distractingly imprecise, like blotchy coloring in a comic strip, and taken...
This comes as no great surprise. While Hitchcock's talent lay in planting even the most implausible action within plots that were enclosed in, and aerated by, chilly factual details, DePalma has always submerged his stories under a torrent of extravagant stylistic effects, ditching Hitchcock's logic, his psychological insight, his mooring in the specific tension and atmosphere of a given situation or place. He shares Hitchcock's cynicism about human relations, but he has none of the sly, mordant perception that makes this cynicism persuasive and disquieting. In Dressed to Kill he dispenses with Psycho's emotional complications...
These gimmicks could provide the basis for a great horror movie. In fact, they have: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. But Brian De Palma seems to have been inspired by his first youthful look at Psycho the way other teen-agers are affected by a helpful teacher or a first kiss: he has built his obsession into a career. De Palma's last seven films, from Sisters in 1973 to the current Dressed to Kill, have been informed by Hitchcock's work until some of them begin to look like remakes. Dressed to Kill is the most explicit...
...movies no longer explore these tensions; they have become exhibitions of a master puppeteer pulling high-tension strings. In Dressed to Kill, the marionettes on-screen still respond to De Palma's manipulations. Moviegoers may not, especially those who hoped that De Palma would become the heir to Hitchcock's throne rather than the scavenger of his vaults. -By Richard Corliss
Larry Gelbart's original script-about a couple of high-society crooks, their $30 million heist and the wily Scotland Yard inspector (David Niven) who dogs their trail-may have meant to revive the old Hitchcock tradition of sophisticated comedy. But so frail a genre is more style than substance, and Siegel's trooper-boot direction flattens out the laugh lines and bits of business until they have all the charm of an airport runway. Gelbart was smart enough to remove his name from the credits (hence the screenwriter pseudonym). Reynolds was not so lucky...