Even in 1980, I heard people guffaw that DRESSED TO KILL "was the worst movie I've ever seen in my life."
The truth is, it's both really bad, with flashes of brilliance.
For one thing, DTK takes a satirical tone -- deliberately or not -- cheesily burlesquing the seedy sexual flavor of so many films from the late-'70s.
I'm not sure that it's possible for that to really work all that well cinematically, without the project being marred by the baseness it's portraying, as did all such projects at the time.
Even though I'm very fond of the 1970s (and it got a bad rap during the endless revisionism of the '80s) there was a definitively sleazy, gutter undertone to the latter half of the decade which worked its way into even mainstream movies. (CRUISING seems a prime example which, while not graphic by today's standards maybe, nonetheless tapped into the sordid, carnally apocalyptic tone of the day). Likewise, the period seemed the apex of real life serial killer zeitgeist somehow.
DTK struggles to parody and indulge in all of that simultaneously, and it achieves an uneven balance.
And yet the museum sequence, although silly at times as well, can't be ignored.
Still, believing Angie Dickinson can't get laid seems a stretch.
DTK one of those late-'70s (as I always say, 1980 was the last year of the '70s) urban sleaze kinds of films like LOOKING FOR MR GOODBAR and CRUISING and CALIGULA and (my absolute favorite) EYES OF LAURA MARS where the period plays a key role in why they don't entirely work -- and yet why they do work.
The '70s had a melancholy, breezy, sexy thing going on which defined the decade, yet the last half of that decade also had an odd gutter-smarm undercurrent which is hard to describe but at the time was hard to miss... It wasn't the only era to give us real life serial sex murderers, but -- gee! -- no other era seemed to fit it so well.
Movies tapped into this vibe as well. And if it was going to do so effectively, you had to wind up getting a bit queasy during or after watching it. And that was these films' strengths as well as their vulnerability to partly-valid criticism.
Curiously, motion pictures can get much more explicit today, but few of them feel so utterly fetishistic as those from the late-'70s (or, technically, 1980).
These films were repellent in many ways, largely on purpose. But the sordid-beyond-belief flavor was absolutely part of the zeitgeist of the time.
I remember sneering at DRESSED TO KILL in 1980 when I was a teenager, and (as I stated above) I heard people say, "that was the worst movie I ever saw in my life" and I understood their disdain for it (and, subjectively, I don't like seeing Angie slaughtered so meticulously) and found the score both effective and, in places, inappropriate... And yet the silent museum sequence grew on me with time and, like many of those late-'70s snuffy-sleaze pictures, I retained an interest in them without fully condoning them.
They're period pieces, essentially. And valuable for that reason.
And they sort of define that old, over-used idea that "it's so bad it's almost good."
The truth is, it's both really bad, with flashes of brilliance.
For one thing, DTK takes a satirical tone -- deliberately or not -- cheesily burlesquing the seedy sexual flavor of so many films from the late-'70s.
I'm not sure that it's possible for that to really work all that well cinematically, without the project being marred by the baseness it's portraying, as did all such projects at the time.
Even though I'm very fond of the 1970s (and it got a bad rap during the endless revisionism of the '80s) there was a definitively sleazy, gutter undertone to the latter half of the decade which worked its way into even mainstream movies. (CRUISING seems a prime example which, while not graphic by today's standards maybe, nonetheless tapped into the sordid, carnally apocalyptic tone of the day). Likewise, the period seemed the apex of real life serial killer zeitgeist somehow.
DTK struggles to parody and indulge in all of that simultaneously, and it achieves an uneven balance.
And yet the museum sequence, although silly at times as well, can't be ignored.
Still, believing Angie Dickinson can't get laid seems a stretch.
DTK one of those late-'70s (as I always say, 1980 was the last year of the '70s) urban sleaze kinds of films like LOOKING FOR MR GOODBAR and CRUISING and CALIGULA and (my absolute favorite) EYES OF LAURA MARS where the period plays a key role in why they don't entirely work -- and yet why they do work.
The '70s had a melancholy, breezy, sexy thing going on which defined the decade, yet the last half of that decade also had an odd gutter-smarm undercurrent which is hard to describe but at the time was hard to miss... It wasn't the only era to give us real life serial sex murderers, but -- gee! -- no other era seemed to fit it so well.
Movies tapped into this vibe as well. And if it was going to do so effectively, you had to wind up getting a bit queasy during or after watching it. And that was these films' strengths as well as their vulnerability to partly-valid criticism.
Curiously, motion pictures can get much more explicit today, but few of them feel so utterly fetishistic as those from the late-'70s (or, technically, 1980).
These films were repellent in many ways, largely on purpose. But the sordid-beyond-belief flavor was absolutely part of the zeitgeist of the time.
I remember sneering at DRESSED TO KILL in 1980 when I was a teenager, and (as I stated above) I heard people say, "that was the worst movie I ever saw in my life" and I understood their disdain for it (and, subjectively, I don't like seeing Angie slaughtered so meticulously) and found the score both effective and, in places, inappropriate... And yet the silent museum sequence grew on me with time and, like many of those late-'70s snuffy-sleaze pictures, I retained an interest in them without fully condoning them.
They're period pieces, essentially. And valuable for that reason.
And they sort of define that old, over-used idea that "it's so bad it's almost good."