UNDRESSED TO KILL

DRESSED TO KILL (1980)
dir: Brian DePalma

UNDRESSED TO KILL
MAD #222, April 1981
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker

At the beginning, Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is taking a shower and is attacked, but it turns out this is just a game she's playing with her husband.

That afternoon, Kate has a psychiatric session with her doctor, Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) and tells him of her feelings of sexual frustration, then spends a day at the museum. A strange man sits down next to her and she takes off her glove so that he can see she's wearing a wedding ring, and walks away trying to avoid him.

Kate realizes she has lost the glove, writes it off, and as she leaves, she sees the stranger at a taxi motioning to her that he's found the missing glove and realizes she was just being paranoid in thinking he was trying to pick her up. Then when she goes to apologize to him, she finds she was right all along when the guy is a masher after all and attacks her. The cab driver does nothing about it because life was just one big frat house in 1980. It's been established that she has fantasies of being attacked and she goes home with him. She lets herself out after sex and is killed in the elevator leaving.

[UPDATE: Now that I see it again, I think she was purposely trying to get the perverted guy to pick her up, and this was a game the two of them were playing. Me and my ignorance of how rape fantasies work.]

Liz Blake (Nancy Allen), a prostitute, is leaving the building at the same time and sees Kate's dead body in the elevator, and the transvestite killer, who we only see in a wig and dark glasses, leaving the scene. The killer happens to be a client of Dr. Elliott, who has stolen his razor. He won't disclose information to Lt. Marino (Dennis Franz), the detective investigating the case, and Kate's son Peter (Keith Gordon) is doing investigating of his own. Liz, having witnessed the murder, is being chased throughout the city.

Nancy Allen was married to director Brian DePalma during the making of this.

Liz is also being chased on the subway by people she managed to piss off as well but is saved at the last moment by Peter, and forms a friendship with him. He tells of how he has been trying to track down the killer by secretly filming when patients go in and out of the doctor's office. Dr. Elliott confides in another doctor how this killer is loose because the doctor wouldn't approve of a gender transformation. Although we all know it's a variation now, such a thing was considered a mental condition in 1980.

[UPDATE: In Brian DePalma's Home Movies, there's also a flirtatous relationship between Keith Gordon and Nancy Allen, and he plays a budding filmmaker in that as well, leading me to believe the character may be semi-autobiographical].

Now that Liz knows the killer's name (it's not in the parody, but she figures it out with Peter), she seduces the doctor so she can get to his appointment book and find out where Bobbi, the murderer, lives, so the police can get him. The killer is revealed to be Dr. Elliott himself, who becomes murderous when his male side is aroused (back then, being transgender had to be depicted as binary, and there was no differentiation between transvestism and transgenderism). Here it's revealed to be Tony Perkins from Psycho.