An adaptation and modern-day update of Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, this was the second de Sade film made by Jess Franco*, but by no means the last. In fact, it’s not even the previous movie, called Eugenie, that he would make. While this one is Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (or De Sade 70 or Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir), there’s also the better-known — and Soledad Miranda-starring — Eugenie de Sade.

Eugenie (Marie Liljedahl, Inga, Dorian Gray) has spent her entire life in a convent, and despite an exterior that drives men and women wild with lust, she’s inexperienced in the ways of the world. Her father (Paul Muller, Nana, Barbed Wire Dolls) wants to bed Madame Saint Ange (the wife of producer Harry Alan Towers who appears in 99 Women, Venus In Furs and The Bloody Judge amongst other movies; don’t judge her being in this as nepotism, because she’s amazing in this movie), who agrees as long as she can take Eugenie to her secluded island mansion, where she and her step-brother Mirvel (Jack Taylor, whose career in exploitation movies took him all over the world) can seduce her and probably each other and definitely everyone and play the kind of strange incestual games that only the super rich seem to play.

Sir Christopher Lee also shows up as the narrator for all this wallowing and also as Dolmance, the leader of a cult of fiends that drug young women and beat them with whips and yeah, Sir Christopher claims he had no idea what kind of movie he was in, which I find hilarious, because this wouldn’t be the last time he’d work with Franco. Providing his own wardrobe — the smoking jacket he wore in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace — Lee claimed that he was unaware there was a nude woman on the sacrificial altar behind him, as Franco and crew had wrapped drapery over her that they’d yank off as soon as the camera started and would then recover her when he was done with his scene. I mean, I love Jess, but sometimes he can barely focus the camera. One wonders how he’d ever had the chicanery and ability to pull one over on a man who was once quite literally a secret agent.

This movie feels like a dream. I’ve said that of other Franco movies, but trust me, a much better-realized, better-shot dream, with a score by Bruno Nicolai that makes it seem way classier than it is.

*The first is Marquis de Sade: Justine.

After studying at USC, director Richard Franklin returned to Australia, where he directed four episodes of the Australian police drama Homicide before making this film and Fantasm. Based on the folk poem “The Ballad of Eskimo Nell,” which is about well-endowed Dead-Eye Dick and sidekick Mexican Pete being unable to satisfy sex worker Eskimo Nell, this finds Dead-Eye Dick (Max Gillies) as a common peeper. He discovers a husband about to kill Mexico Pete (Serge Lazareff) for sleeping with his wife, so he saves him, and they head to Alaska to find Nell.

Franklin says it was never his intention to make a sex comedy, as he wanted to make something like Midnight Cowboy. The poem is known only in what Franklin called the English world of Canada, Australia, and England, so it had limited hopes in the U.S. However, as government funds were used to make this movie, a softcore comedy, people were not happy. Franklin said, “The theatres were picketed, and it was actually fairly successful in terms of damaging the picture. I thought it would be great publicity, but the one thing people don’t want to hear is that tax dollars have been wasted. The minute they hear that, they’re less inclined to throw good money after bad, if you see what I mean. So the film was not successful.”

It also didn’t help that a British film based on the same poem, Eskimo Nell, was released at the same time, when it didn’t make it to Australia until 1976, when it was called The Sexy Saga of Naughty Nell and Big Dick.

Or that sex symbol Abigail was upset about being fully frontal in this film. A public rift was reported in the Australian press between Franklin and the singer/actress, with the headline “Movie Producer Abigail: He Used My Body.”

If The Alaska Kid is familiar, it’s because he’s played by pro wrestler Paul “Butcher” Vachon.

Also known as The Equinox … A Journey into the Supernatural and The Beast, this movie was directed by Jack Woods and Dennis Muren. It started as a $6500 film that Muren made with his friends Dave Allen, Jim Danforth and Mark McGee while he was in business classes at Pasadena City College. Strangely enough, Ed Bagley Jr. was one of the cameramen!

Producer Jack H. Harris hired editor Woods to add enough footage to make this a full-length film. When the final movie was released, Muren was listed as the associate producer, even though he directed the entire movie and created many of the effects.

Four teenagers — David Fielding, Susan Turner, Jim Hudson (Frank Bonner, who would go on to be Herb Tarlek on WKRP in Cincinnati) and Jim’s girlfriend, Vicki — have gone looking for a lost scientist named Dr. Arthur Waterman, who is played by Fritz Leiber. Leiber isn’t just any actor. Nope, he’s one of the foremost fantasy authors of all time and the person who actually came up with the term sword and sorcery. He was brought into this project by Famous Monsters of Filmland editor Forrest J. Ackerman.

They have a picnic — as you do when you’re in the foreboding woods — then make their way to a mysterious castle. They also learn that Dr. Waterman’s cabin has been destroyed, and even worse, the demon Asmodeus (played by Jack Woods, the new director, when he’s a park ranger at least) is hunting them with his army of monsters. He really goes after them once they get a book of spells from an old man inside a cave. Those monsters — a giant ape and a green-furred giant — are marvels of stop-motion. Our heroes barely escape as the ape kills the old man.

It turns out the book belonged to Dr. Waterman, who used it to conjure demons of his own, but lost control of a tentacled beast that destroyed his home. After Asmodeus kills Jim, he reveals his true form as a winged demon. Dave and Susan are killed before our remaining teens, Dave and Susan, make their way to a cemetery.

After a battle with Asmodeus, they destroy the demon with a giant cross, which causes the cemetery to explode, killing Susan. Another giant monster appears and tells Dave that he will die in one year and a day, which drives him insane. The movie quickly moves to that time, where we see Susan — now looking totally evil — showing up at his insane asylum.

The entire crew that made this movie did so much more afterward. Muren would go on to become a nine-time Oscar-winning visual-effects artist for his work on Star Wars and Jurassic Park. Danforth would create matte and stop-motion work for The Thing, Creepshow, Clash of the Titans, and Prince of Darkness, among others. Mark McGee, who was in high school when he worked on this film and was already writing for Famous Monsters (he’s the one who got connected with Leiber and brought Forry along to be a doctor’s voice), wrote the scripts for Sorority House Massacre II and Sorceress, both movies directed by Jim Wynorski. Finally, David Allen would go on to work on everything from Flesh Gordon, Laserblast and The Howling to Full Moon efforts like the Puppet Master series and The Dungeonmaster.

You can see the influence of Equinox on movies like Evil Dead and Phantasm. It’s the bridge between the Ray Harryhausen stop motion movies they loved and the occult-tinged efforts that would make up 1970s genre films. This is a movie packed with ideas and talent.

Jamaa Fanaka may have been one of the leading directors of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, but he’s probably best known for his Penitentiary films. Born Walter Gordon, he changed his name so that anyone seeing his movies would know that he was black. Working alongside one of the professors in the African Studies department at UCLA, he came up with the name Jamaa Fanaka, which means “through togetherness we will find success.”

Emma Mae is his first full-length movie, written when he was still in college. It’s the story of a young woman (Jerri Hayes) moving from the deep south to Los Angeles, where she falls in love with Jesse Amos (Ernest Williams III), who soon goes to jail along with Zeke (Charles David Brooks III) for fighting the police.

Also known as Black Sister’s Revenge, it follows Emma Mae as she tries to raise cash to get her man out of jail, starting with a car wash and ending with a bank robbery, only to learn that he never loved her. She then beats him into oblivion, a moment not often seen in film. She reclaims who he is and moves on.

Fanaka would make wilder pictures, but this is an excellent introduction to how he was trying to tell the black experience, even if it is episodic and wanders a bit.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Italian movie logic: Emanuelle in Bangkok is the sequel to Black Emanuelle, and Black Emanuelle 2 is not.

Photojournalist Emanuelle (as always Laura Gemser) and her archaeologist friend Roberto (Gemser’s husband Gabriele Tinti) are on a series of journeys, whether it’s to meet a Thai king or explode caves in Casablanca or meet a special masseuse or being too close to Prince Sanit (Ivan Rassimov) or Roberto forcing her to choose between him and a female lover Debra (Debra Berger, who was in the Tobe Hooper version of Invaders from Mars).

Like all the D’Amato Emanuelle movies, these films go from narrative to travelogue to mondo, with simulated moments of lovemaking standing in stark contrast to real moments of horrifying violence, like a battle between a mongoose and a snake. And that ping pong trick that other movies joke about? This movie has it.

Yet it’s also a movie that synchronizes pistons on a ship with the first lovemaking scene like high art and has a heroine that refuses to be possessed no matter how many men try to destroy her, breaking hearts and remaining independent and perhaps it’s my hope for a better world and my innocence that I see something life-affirming in the Black Emanuelle films, a series of movies devoted to softcore lovemaking interspersed with brutality. But hey — that’s me.

You know how Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups old commercials used to go? Well, the makers of this movie got a real smart idea. They took the two big trends of the early 70s — blacksploitation and martial arts — and made one movie with both of them.

Stud Brown (Timothy Brown, a former NFL player who was also on M*A*S*H*) and Larry Chin (Alan Tang) unite to battle drug dealers and find Chin’s brother Wei (James Hong). They’re up against a corrupt cop named Detective Burke (Aldo Ray!) and the disappearance of our hero’s brother may not be as tragic as it seems.

What makes this movie worth watching is the dream team of director Al Adamson and producer Cirio H. Santiago. Lovers of truly bottom basement movies see these two names and feel a certain twinge, the kind you get when you remember young love or holidays gone by.

Another important thing for lovers of 70s exploitation cinema to notice is that the deaf mute love interest Sarah is played by Carol Speed, who is known and loved as Abby.

Directed by Chang Cheh and written by Chiu Kang-Chien, this is about Tang Ren-jie (Ti Lung) and his older brother, Tang Ren-lin (Ku Feng), who are the adopted son and henchman of triad leader Shen Tian-hung (Yeung Chi-hing). Shen wants to retire, but before that, he uses  Tang Ren-jie (Ti Lung) and The Rambler (David Chiang) to put an end to his rivalry with rival Liu Shou-yi (Ho Ban). The plan goes badly when both bosses are killed; Tang takes the blame and is kicked out of the country. Yet when he returns, he discovers a plot to destroy both of the gangs.

What a wild movie! Tang Ren-jie has a tattoo of a woman on his chest, and it’s said that whenever The Rambler rambles, someone has to die. This being a Chang Cheh movie, you can be assured that nearly everyone will die.

In the U.S., this was released as Duel of the Iron Fist and Revenge of the Dragons. It was distributed in 1971 by United International Pictures, who also brought you Scalpel, Sixteen and Devil In the Flesh and in 1973 by Howard Mahler Films, who proudly presented Satanico Pandemonium, The Last Victim (Forced Entry) and The Love Doctors.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Dr. Henry Jekyll (James Mathers, who also wrote this movie; he was a playwright and actor whose career was filled with minor roles on TV and on stage) is the grandson of the one from the book and lives in San Francisco. This movie feels like it could take place in the 1800s or 1979, depending on the scene. He invites his teacher, Professor Atkinson (John F. Kearney, in his first acting role at the age of 48; he’s follow that with non-sex roles in the Gary Graver adult movies Indecent Proposal and Society Affairs; he also directed Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men at the Savoy Theatre in London, England with George Costigan, Matthew Kelly and Tyrone Huggins in the cast and OH YEAH is Mike Justice’s dad!) to see his work and commisaerate on the death of Atkinson’s daughter — and Jekyll’s girlfriend and lab assistant — Julia (Dawn Carver Kelly, one and done).

Except that his experiments involve making men and women battle in proto-MMA fights after being injected with drugs. And he also has a mute sister, Hilda (Nadine Kalmes), whom he claims that he hates and desires as much as their mother. There’s also his lab assistant, Boris (Jake Pearson), who we’re led to believe was attacked by Jekyll during an adventure and is now serving him. 

Jekyll wants to hurt — or marry — Julia and often forces her to accept him making love to her while his sister watches one-handed from the hallway. He also likes to whip Boris and say “Love is pain” over and over again. He also loves to inject his test cases — Rick Alemany (also the fight coordinator), Tes Luz, Lydia Altamirano, Jesse Washington and Earl Garlin — in fights to the death that are way too worked. 

It’s…well, great is too much, but it’s certainly strange, as everyone starts this movie on 10 or zero, depending on if you’re a scientist or brainswashed, and you get long scenes of savagery and the professor screaming “No, no, no more!” 

Hyde Productions Inc. registered its copyright in Nevada, and the premiere was a double feature with The Driller Killer at Miami-area drive-ins: the Turnpike Drive-In, the Tropicaire Drive-In, and the Homestead Theatre. Arthur Weisberg, the presenter of this film, also used the name Rochelle Gail Weisberg, also was behind Teeny Buns, C.B. Hustlers, Drive In Massacre, Spirit of Seventy Sex, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, The Driller Killer and Ms. 45. He also conducted the score for Dark Dreams, played basoon on The Miracle Worker and is credited with inventing the “Future Basoon” and taught at the Juilliard School, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Yale School of Music, Manhattan School of Music and Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Let’s get this out of the way: Brian De Palma, much like Giallo, was heavily influenced by Hitchcock. In fact, when an interviewer asked Hitchcock if he saw the film as an homage, he replied, “You mean fromage.” That said — Hitchcock died three months before the film was released, so that story could be apocryphal (it’s been said that the famous director made this comment to either a reporter or John Landis).

What is true is the interview that De Palma did after Dressed to Kill (Rolling Stone, October 16, 1980).  The director claimed, “My style is very different from Hitchcock’s. I am dealing with surrealistic, erotic imagery. Hitchcock never got into that too much. Psycho is basically about a heist. A girl steals money for her boyfriend so they can get married. Dressed to Kill is about a woman’s secret erotic life. If anything, Dressed to Kill has more of a Buñuel feeling.”

However, I’d argue that this film has more in common with Giallo than anything the “Master of Suspense” directly created. That’s because—to agree with DePalma above—this film does not exist in our reality. Much like Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, it exists in its dream reality, where the way we perceive time can shift and change based on the storyteller’s whims.

Yet what of DePalma being dismissive of Argento in interviews, claiming that while he saw the director as having talent, he’d only seen one of his films? Or should we believe his ex-muse/wife Nancy Allen, who claims that when she told DePalma that she was auditioning for Argento’s Inferno, he said, “Oh, he’s goooood.”

Contrast that with this very simple fact (and spoilers ahead, for those of you who worry about that sort of thing, but face facts, this movie is 37 years old): DePalma rips off one of Hitchcock’s best tricks from Psycho: he kills his main character off early in the film, forcing us to suddenly choose who we see as the new lead, placing the killer several steps ahead of not just our protagonists, but the audience itself.

And yet there are so many other giallo staples within this film: fashion is at the forefront, with a fetishistic devotion to gloves, dresses, spiked high heels, and lingerie being displayed and removed and lying in piles all over an apartment or doctor’s office. This is the kind of film that makes you stop and notice an outfit, such as what Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson, Big Bad Mama, TV’s Police Woman) wears to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the blue coat that Liz Blake (Nancy Allen, Carrie, Strange Invaders) wears to meet Dr. Robert Elliot (Michael Caine, how could we pick any movie other than Jaws 4: The Revenge).

Then there are the music cues from Pino Donaggio, who also scored Don’t Look Now, Fulci’s The Black Cat, and Argento’s Do You Like Hitchcock? The film not only looks the part, but it has intense sound, too.

We also have characters trying to prove their innocence, investigating ahead of the police. Or the son of the murder victim who wants to discover why his mother really died. Or her doctor, who has an insane patient named Bobbi who has stolen his straight razor and demands that she give him more time than the rest of her patients. All of them could be the killer. Giallo gives us no assurances that just because we see someone as the protagonist, there’s no reason they couldn’t also be the antagonist.

Let’s toss in a little moral ambiguity here, too. Kate is a woman who is bored with her life. She’s raised a son and seen her marriage lose any hope of sexual frisson. Liz is a prostitute — no slut shaming here, she’s a strong businesswoman more than anything  — but she’s also a practiced liar, as a scene shows her deftly manipulating several people via phone to get the money she needs to buy stock based off an insider tip she receives from a client. Dr. Elliot is obviously attracted to Kate but claims that his marriage prevents him from having sex with her. Yet it seems like he has secrets beyond informing the police of the threats of his obviously unbalanced patient, Bobbi. And then there’s Peter, Kate’s son, who has no issues using his surveillance equipment to spy on the police or Liz. If this character seems the most sympathetic, remember that he is the closest to the heart of DePalma, whose mother once asked him to follow and record his father to prove that he was cheating on her.

Finally, we have the color palette of Bava’s takes on giallo mixed with extreme zooms, split screens and attention to the eyes of our characters. The blood cannot be redder.

The film opens with Kate in the shower. While the producers asked Dickinson to claim that it’s her body, it’s really Victoria Johnson (Grizzly) as a body double. Her husband comes into the shower to make love to her, but she finds it robotic and not the passion she feels she deserves. Directly after, she tells Dr. Elliot that she’s frustrated and attempts to seduce him, but he rejects her.

More depressed than before the appointment started, she heads to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite being surrounded by inspiration, such as the statue of Diana by Saint-Guadens, West Interior by Alex Katz and Reclining Nude by Tom Palmore (a tip of the hat to the amazing I Talk You Bored blog for an insightful take on the film and the research as to what each work of art is), she absentmindedly writes entries in her schedule. Planning the holiday meal gets her through the mindlessness of her life, flowing penmanship reminding her to “pick up turkey” instead of slowing down and appreciating not just the artwork around her but the people. There’s a young couple in lust if not love. There’s a young family. And then, a man with dark glasses catches her eye before brazenly sitting down next to her.

We are used to male characters chasing after female characters who aren’t defined by anything other than being sex objects. Instead, we have Kate pursuing the man, making the first, second, and even third moves until we realize that she was just following the man’s breadcrumbs.

Of note here is that color plays an essential role in the scene, as do expected manners. Kate is a wife and mother. She is who society expects to have virtue, and she is clad in all white, but her intentions are anything but pure. She finally has what she wants—the thrilling sex life that she may have only read about in trashy paperbacks.

This scene is a master class in pacing and movement. Imagine, if you will, the words on the page: Kate follows a mystery man through the museum. And yet, those are just eight words. We get nearly nine minutes of wordless pursuit, yet it never grows dull.

Finally, Kate follows the man out of the museum, but she loses him until she looks up and sees her glove dangled from a taxi. But blink, and you miss death in the background as Bobbi blurs past the camera.

When we catch up with Kate, it’s hours for her but seconds for us because this movie is a dream universe. She wakes up in bed with a stranger. There’s a gorgeous camera move here as DePalma moves the camera backward, an inverse of how a lesser director would have treated this scene. Instead of showing the two lovers tumbling through the apartment and removing clothes at every turn, we see Kate reassembling herself to move from her fantasy world to reality and toward her real world, which will soon become a nightmare. The camera slides slowly backward as she gets dressed, remembering via split-screen and sly smile how she doesn’t even remember where her panties have gone. She’s still wearing white, but under it all, she’s bare, her garments lost in a strange man’s house. A man whose name she doesn’t even know.

So now, as she emerges from realizing her sexual fantasies, she feels that she must make sense of it. She wants to write a note to say goodbye but doesn’t want to overthink it. Maybe she doesn’t even want it to happen again. And then she learns more about the man. It starts with his name and then becomes more than she ever wished to find out: his health report shows that he has multiple STDs.

Kate leaves the apartment and makes her way to the elevator, where she tries to avoid anyone’s eyes. In the background, we see an ominous red light, ala Bava. Bobbi—death and punishment for sin—is coming.

The death scene — I hold fast to my claim that The New York Ripper is close to this film but made by a director who doesn’t have the sense to cut away from violence — DePalma stages his version of the shower scene. But more than Psycho, we’ve come to identify with Kate. She’s a woman fast approaching middle age who wants a thrill, and yet, she’s punished by disease and death. She didn’t deserve this, and her eyes pleaded not to the killer as much as they did to the camera. And to us.

Here’s where we have to wonder aloud about DePalma’s long-discussed misogyny. This film was protested by women’s groups, who stated in this leaflet that “FROM THE INSIDIOUS COMBINATION OF VIOLENCE AND SEXUALITY IN ITS PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL TO SCENE AFTER SCENE OF WOMEN RAPED, KILLED, OR NEARLY KILLED, DRESSED TO KILL IS A MASTER WORK OF MISOGYNY.” Is DePalma guilty of the slasher film trope of “you fuck, and you die?” Maybe. Perhaps if she had remembered her marriage, at best, she wouldn’t be here. At worst, she wouldn’t have forgotten her ring in the stranger’s apartment and would have survived.

The way I see it, the death of Kate allows us to make the transition from past protagonist to new heroine, as the doors open post-murder to reveal a grisly scene to Liz and her john. The older man runs while Liz reaches out to Kate, their eyes meeting and fingers nearly touching. Kate’s white purity has been decimated by the razor slashes of Bobbi, the killer. As their transference is almost complete, Liz notices Bobbi in the mirror. Remember that we’re in a dream state? Time completely stops here, so we get an extreme zoom of both the mirror and Liz’s face. She escapes just in time, grasping the murder weapon and standing in the hallway, blood on her hands as a woman screams in the background, figuring her for the killer.

At this point, the film switches its protagonist. Unlike the films of David Lynch, like Mulholland Drive, this transference is not a changed version of the main character, but her exact opposite. Kate wore white, was older, and had a marriage and child, yet she slowly came to feel like an object to the men in her life. Liz wore black, was young and single, but was wise to the games of sex and power. She isn’t manipulated, turning the tables on men by using their needs for personal gain. Kate may have seen sexual fantasy as her greatest need, but for Liz, it’s just a means to an end.

Kate and Liz are as different as can be. For example, Kate goes to the museum to find inspiration. Liz only sees art as commerce, and she spends plenty of time explaining to Peter how much money she could make by acquiring a painting.

Dr. Elliott discovers a message from Bobbi on his answering machine (these machines and the narrative devices they enable must seem quaint and perhaps even anachronistic to today’s moviegoers). Once, Bobbi was his patient, but he refused to sign the paperwork for their (as the pronoun hasn’t been defined, so I’ll use they/their) sex change. In fact, Dr. Elliot has gone so far as to convince Bobbi’s new doctor that they are a danger to herself and others.

The police, however, have arrested Liz, and Detective Marino (Dennis Franz, TV’s Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue) doesn’t believe a word she has to say. There’s a great moment here where Liz goes from wide-eyed ingenue to knowing cynic in the face of Marino’s misogynistic tone. Meanwhile, Kate’s son Peter (Keith Gordon, Jaws 2, Christine) uses his listening devices in the station to learn more about his mother’s death than the police are willing to let on.

He begins tracking Liz, obsessively noting the times that she comes and goes from her apartment. He’s doing the same to Elliot’s office. But he’s not the only one tracking people. Bobbi has been stalking Liz, including a sequence where our heroine goes from being chased by a gang of black men to talking with an unbelieving police officer to Peter saving her from Bobbi with a spray of mace.

Because Peter has seen Bobbi also emerging from Dr. Elliott’s office, so he joins forces with Liz to discover who she is. That means that Liz uses her chief weapon — sex — to distract the doctor long enough to discover Bobbi’s real name and information. We learn that Liz’s mental sex game is as strong as her physical attributes here — she says that she must be good to be paid as well as she is. She knows precisely the fantasy Dr. Elliott wants to hear. But perhaps she also knows the fantasy that the mainly male slasher/giallo viewer wants: the woman submitting to the killer holding the knife.

Peter watches outside in the rain when a tall blonde pulls him away. Has he been taken by Bobbi? No — Liz returns to have sex with Dr. Elliott; he has been replaced by the killer. Bobbi lifts the razor as Liz helplessly crosses her arms in front of her face for protection. But at the last minute, the blonde who grabbed Peter outside is revealed to be a police officer, as she shoots Bobbi through the glass. That shattered pane also breaks Bobbi’s illusion and mask, revealing that Dr. Elliott is the man under the makeup and clothes.

The killer is arrested and goes into an insane asylum; Dr. Levy explains that while the Bobbi side of his personality wanted to be free, the Dr. Elliott side would not allow them to become a true woman. Therefore, whenever a woman broke through and aroused the male side of the persona, the female side would emerge and kill the offending female.

Inside the mental asylum, a buxom nurse attends to the male patients. The room is bathed in blue light, a cool lighting scheme that echoes Mario Bava’s films. The movie has moved from a dream version of reality to a pure dream sequence. It intrigues me that Carrie and Dressed to Kill both start with a shower scene and end with a dream threat to the surviving secondary heroine.

Within the asylum, Dr. Elliott overcomes the nurse and slowly, methodically, folds her clothing over her nude form. As he begins to either dress in her clothes — or worse, molest her dead body — the camera slowly moves upward as we realize that there is a gallery of other patients all watching and screaming. This scene reminds me of the gallery of residents watching a doctor perform surgery, yet inverted (have you caught this theme yet?) and perverted.

Bobbi emerges once again, and because she is dead, she cannot be stopped. Liz is bare and helpless in the shower, and nothing can protect her from being slashed and sliced and murdered — except that none of this is real. She awakens, screaming in bed, and Peter rushes in to protect her. And for the first time in the film (again, thanks to I Talk You Bored for noticing), she is wearing white.

Many find this a hard movie to stomach due to its misogyny. I’ll see you that and tell you it’s a misanthropic film that presents all of humanity, male and female, negatively. The men in this film are actually treated the way women usually are in films, as either silent sex objects (Warren Lockman), sexless enemies (Kate’s husband), shrill harpies that need to be defeated (Detective Marino) or sexless best friends who provide the hero with the tools they need to save the day (Peter). Seriously, in another film, one would think Peter would have a sexual interest in Liz, but despite her double entendres and come-ons, he remains more concerned with schedules and numbers and evidence.

Bobbi, the combination of male and female, comes across as a puritan punisher of females who benefit from sex, either emotionally or monetarily. Or perhaps they are just destroying the sex objects that they know that the male side of their brain will never allow them to become. Interestingly, Bobbi’s voice doesn’t come from Michael Caine but from De Palma regular William Finley (The Phantom of Phantom of the Paradise).

What else makes this a giallo? The police seem either unwilling to help at best or ineffectual at worst until they tie things up neatly at the end. And the conclusion, when the hand emerges not from the doorway — but the medicine cabinet — to slash Liz echoes the more fantastic films in the genre, such as Suspiria, All the Colors of the Dark and Stagefright, where reality just ceases to exist. At the end of all three films, the heroine has confronted the fantastic and may never be the same.

In the first, Suzy narrowly escapes from hell on earth and emerges laughing in the rain. Is she happy that she survived? Has she achieved a break from reality? Is she breaking the fourth wall and laughing at how insane the film has become, pleased that the torture is finally over?

In the final scene of All the Colors of the Dark, the fantasy world is all a ruse, yet our heroine, Jane, is now trapped in the dream world. She can tell what will happen before it does; she knows that her husband has both slept with and killed her sister, but he has saved her from a fate worse than death. Yet all she can do is shout, “I’m scared of not being myself anymore. Help me!”

In Stagefright, the final girl walks out of the scene and out of reality as she defeats the killer. She has transcended being an actress to removing herself from fiction.

In all these films, the characters are not unchanged by their experiences with the dream world. In Dressed to Kill, the final dream sequence renders Liz truly frightened for the first time in the film. It’s the only time we see her as vulnerable — even when faced with an entire gang of criminals on the subway, she retains her edge. As Peter reaches out to comfort her — the only sexless male in the film and not just a sublimated one like Dr. Elliott — she recoils from his touch before giving in to his protective embrace.

In the same way, the film changes us. It has thrilled us, made us think, or even made us angry. True cinema—true art, really—makes us confront what we find most uncomfortable. Sure, we can deride and decry many of this film’s choices, but the fact that I’ve devoted days of writing and over three thousand words to it speaks to its potency. Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far.

PS—I’ve often discussed—in person and on podcasts—that I experienced so many R-rated movies for the first time via Mad Magazine. I’m delighted I could find the Mort Drucker illustration for his skewering of Dressed to Kill.