JOBLO'S FACE-OFF - 'PSYCHO' v. 'DRESSED TO KILL'
TURNS OUT TO BE RATHER DISAPPOINTING, SHORT-SIGHTED VIEWPOINT
With
M. Night Shyamalan's
Split released last week, there have been a lot of articles and reviews mentioning
Brian De Palma and especially
Raising Cain.
JoBlo.com's Cody Hamman posted a "Face-Off" column pitting
Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho opposite De Palma's
Dressed To Kill, with disappointing remarks such as De Palma's main character, Kate Miller, not coming off as "very likeable, so her death doesn't have much emotional impact despite the fact that we've just spent more than 30 minutes watching her." (I am always flummoxed by criticisms that this or that character is not very likeable.) There's also this, regarding
Dressed To Kill: "It's an interesting story of a psycho with multiple personalities, but the way the film mishandles the concept of gender reassignment surgery, treating it as a joke at times,
can be rather cringeworthy when you look at it 37 years later."
And then Hamman completely lost me with this short-sighted gem: "De Palma takes wordless sequences to an extreme in
DRESSED TO KILL. In the first 35 minutes of the film, the characters exchange maybe around 7 minutes of dialogue. The silent seduction at the museum takes up 10 minutes, and as the film goes on there will be several more lengthy stretches without dialogue. Composer
Pino Donaggio plays some good music over these sequences,
but that doesn't stop them from coming off as being painfully dull to me. Unable to connect with the characters, I don't care what they're doing when they're not speaking, so as these sequences drag on and on I struggle to keep my attention on the film."