Every month Bil Antoniou curates an article picking a collection from The Criterion Channel and sorts its contents into categories – Must-See, Worthy, For The Curious and Skip It. This month the collection was Erotic Thrillers.
Dressed To Kill (Brian de Palma, 1980)
Dakota Arsenault: A perfect look into why de Palma is often accused of just being an Alfred Hitchcock thief. This film in particular cribs mostly from Psycho, but also has elements of Rear Window. The film starts off with our protagonist Angie Dickinson as Kate Miller having a sexual fantasy of touching herself in a steamy shower before it turns dark and she is attacked. She’s in a loveless marriage where her husband neglects her sexual needs and discloses this information to her therapist, Dr. Robert Elliot (Michael Caine). She attempts to seduce the handsome doctor but it goes nowhere. After meeting a mysterious man in a museum they rendezvous for a sexual encounter and while leaving him as he sleeps, Kate is brutally murdered in an elevator with a glistening straight razor. A high end escort, Liz Blake (Nancy Allen), not only finds the body of Kate but also spots the tall blonde woman in oversized sunglasses who committed the crime. As a witness Liz is now the next target of the razor wielding murderer while the police look at her as a prime suspect. We get one of the biggest homages to Hitchcock with the act of killing the famous leading actress in the first act of the film, just like how Janet Leigh dies early on in Psycho. Liz teams up with Kate’s son who helps by spying on Dr. Elliot by using binoculars like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. The biggest red flag in the film is how the murderer, a trans character, is portrayed. Yes the film was released in 1980 but using outdated nomenclature like “transvestite” is rough to hear, but worse is the explanation that they are murderous explicitly because they are trans and mentally unstable is reductive and dangerous. It’s no wonder the film was protested by the likes of the National Organization for Women and Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media. Since its release the film has apparently been reclaimed by queer viewers for its campiness, but it must also be used to show how far we have come in society, despite the rise of anti-trans legislation and rhetoric. All that said, this film has some real genuine thrills, some brutal death scenes and doesn’t skimp on the erotic aspect of the genre. While Nancy Allen was a nominee at the inaugural Razzie Awards for Worst Actress, she was a terrific scream queen that fits the now prototypical role of a woman who won’t let others define her or be a victim.
Bound (The Wachowskis, 1996)
Dakota Arsenault: Much will be made about the re-contextualization of this film in the years that have since passed. As we know now, The Wachowski’s transitioned and are now known as Lana and Lilly Wachowski, and it has become popular to look back at their earlier films and see what their true artistic choices may have been. In The Matrix, there is a character known as Switch who originally was written to be a man in the real world and a woman in “the matrix”. They opted to simplify the character and instead make Switch an androgynous woman instead, still inhabiting both male and female characteristics. In Bound we get a typical story of a woman who wants to leave her mobster boyfriend and run away with her new lover to have a normal life again. In the directorial debut of the Wachowski Sisters they change things up by having the lover a woman, making this an out and out lesbian love story. For a mainstream Hollywood film coming out in 1996 that features not only a lesbian couple but also includes an explicit sex scene? Absolutely unheard of. Despite it being a debut feature film, it includes many bold touches, the kind that would later define the directors careers. The plot itself is pretty run of the mill with Violet (Jennifer Tilly) meeting Corky (Gina Gershon) falling in love with her and then conspiring together to steal two million dollars from Violet’s mob launderer boyfriend Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). If it wasn’t for the queer main characters this would be a good, but very run of the mill crime thriller.
