DRESSED TO K*ll (1980)

With Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon, Dennis Franz. Sexual fantasy meets unending nightmare in De Palma’s lusciously overheated horror symphony, which reappropriates the best and worst of Psycho and sends Hitchcock’s cinema-rupturing classic all the way to its steamy, screamy endpoint. Bookended by shower scenes, Dressed to K*ll commences as a portrait of a dissatisfied bourgeois housewife (Dickinson) who flirts with her psychiatrist (Caine) and then catches the eye of a sinister, handsome stranger at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; halfway through the baton—or straight razor—is handed off to a high-class call girl (Allen) embroiled in a murder investigation. As with De Palma, the particulars of plot are less important than the elegant tracking shots, intensely attenuated slow-motion, creepily soft lighting, endless halls of mirrors and doubles, and dramatically distorted view of a frightening New York cityscape emerging from the broke 1970s.
COME EARLY! Doors 6:30pm, pre-show 7pm