Passion.

Christine Stanford the power hungry head of an advertising agency is hero worshipped by her ambitious assistant Isabelle James. When Christine takes the credit for her assistants work Isabelle sets out to take revenge. Sound familiar? I’m not surprised as Passion (2012) is a remake of a French film called Love Crime (2010), remade barely two years after the original. Its nonsense that Brian De Palma remade the film at all as the original was enjoyable but nothing special. Alain Corneau directed the earlier movie shortly before he died of cancer and stared Kristen Scott Thomas as Christine and Ludivine Sagnier as Isabelle. The main strength of Corneau’s original was the sexual undercurrent between the two female protagonists that De Palma’s film completely lacks, which is surprising considering that Rachel Adams is Christine and Movie Ramble favourite Noomi Repace portrays Isabelle who both, I hate to admit it, turn in weak performances.

I suppose the best way to describe it is as a lame TV drama and certainly one that does not excite and is completely uninvolving to such an extent that your concentration is apt to wonder! Although the ending is different it makes Love Crime seem a lot better than it at first appeared. Not De Palma’s best work by far and I liked the LA Times description of the movie as ‘sleeky trashy misfire’[1] which really sums it up. Don’t waste 94 minutes of your life

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[1] LA Times. Robert Abele

Dressed to Kill

There's no doubt that Director Brian De Palma has made some decent movies? Well he did make Scarface (1983)!!!! But Dressed to Kill (1980) is not really one of them. This so-called homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) starts with a shower scene but this one is far more erotic than the one found in the Hitchcock film. It involves a naked Angie Dickinson body double and a bar of soap. Housewife and mother Kate Miller (Dickinson) is having problems with her sex life and is seeing a psychiatrist Dr Robert Elliott (Michael Caine). Upon entering a lift the highly sexed Mrs Miller meets her maker when she is sliced to death by a razor wielding blond. This horrendous crime is witnessed by a high priced call girl Liz Blake, played by Nancy Allen, who foolishly picks up the murder weapon and immediately becomes Detective Marino’s (Dennis Franz best known for his role of Andy Sipowicz in 261 episodes of NYPD Blues) prime suspect. With the help of Kate Millers son Peter (Keith Gordon) Liz Blake has to set out to clear her name by discovering who the blond murderess really is?

 

The razor wielding blond!

or the cigarette smoking blond who did the murder?

This combination of mystery, sex and gore suffers from a strangely dull and implausible narrative, in fact a thriller that does not thrill. Not helped by the corny acting,  a relatively unconvincing outing for De Palma that takes itself far too seriously. But it did do very well at the box office and revived Michael Caine’s acting career after a run of movie disasters. It was originally released in the UK around the time of the Yorkshire Ripper murders and it was suggested that it encouraged the murders and in turn the distributers were lobbied to withdraw the film from the North of England. When Peter Sutcliffe was finally arrested he was asked if he had ever seen the film, he had not, mind you I can’t blame him!