Word: psychos
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...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...
...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 and seizes on Hitchcock's technique--subjective camerawork, sudden high-angle shots, the portentous close-up--so that the horror, and the style by which it's conveyed, become the core of the film...
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...
Some of these pyrotechnics fizzle, and all of them operate in a narrative void. One reason Psycho continues to disturb is that Screenwriter Joseph Stefano gave Norman Bates and his hapless victims some emotional resonance. Even if you never screamed while watching Psycho, you could appreciate it for the sense it gave of seemingly ordinary people drawn into a swamp of frustrations and aggressions. De Palma's 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...
...make love to her adopted teen-age daughter while being sodomized by the family business adviser. Translation: international capitalism and/or the bourgeoisie without social roots and responsibilities are oral and anal erotics seeking to relieve their anxieties with kinks and the false security of filthy lucre. When the psycho-symbolism hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's definitely not amore...