dressed to kill (1980)
De Palma's greatest string of successes, from a creative standpoint, began right here. With an ouvre that includes decades-worth of palpable filmmaking, the 80's were De Palma's decade to release his best work. The fascinating part about Dressed to Kill, as well as 1986's Body Double, are just how closely they mirror the work of Hitchcock (who passed the same year) and how well they subvert the methods of the great master by adding the exploitative, pornographic characteristics of the modern consumer era. The greatest strength of Dressed to Kill is that it is able to compose itself as an elegant, poised fiction, and indulge the growing global thirst for the obscene. Much like Verhoeven and Cronenberg, De Palma's output embodies the zeitgeist of 80's paranoia, 50's obsession, and the final surrender of western culture to the consumer capitol cult, the rise of