One of the more popular functions of contemporary criticism is quality control; from off-color craft beer labels to that colonialist Taylor Swift video, hardly a cultural product goes by that isn’t seized upon and inspected for trace elements of racism, misogyny, and the like. This is fine and noble work, of course, and somebody’s got to keep an eye on the assembly line. But at their most finger-waggy, critics risk becoming “hall monitors,” to borrow a phrase from James Wolcott. “Gender studies / cultural studies grads, who have set up camp on the pop-cult left, can be a prickly lot,” says Wolcott, “ready to pounce on any doctrinal deviation, language-code violation, or reckless disregard of intersectionality.”

It’s hard to imagine a more pounce-ready, politically-incorrect work of pop culture than Brian De Palma’s 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill, which turns 35 this year, and is now out in a new edition from the Criterion Collection. Dressed to Kill is a slasher film about a call girl, played by Nancy Allen, who teams up with a teenager to solve a murder. It’s also what graduate students like to call “problematic.” (A “minefield of potential offense” is how the new edition’s liner notes put it.) There’s the cross-dressing killer, played by Michael Caine; fuzzily soft-core close-ups of Angie Dickinson’s pubic hair, played by Penthouse body double; and plenty of violence against women wearing concealed blood packs.

But although it’s tempting to fire up the hot take, Dressed to Kill is also a slasher film about slasher films. Clever references to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) suggest a tongue half-sheathed in its cheek. De Palma’s film is also lushly aesthetic and a lot of fun: a truly guilty pleasure that, if it came with trigger warnings, would wear them proudly on its sleeve.

De Palma is not much thought about anymore. It’s easy to forget he directed Carrie, which brought blood-soused Sissy Spacek to public consciousness, and Scarface, which continues to supply dorm rooms with a poster, and their occupants, a quotable line. But in the 70s and 80s, De Palma was something like Quentin Tarantino: American cinema’s most notorious purveyor of pastiche and violence. Tarantino tended to repurpose pulpy matter, squeezed from the B-genres it’s become hip to admire, but which only a video clerk could love. De Palma looked higher, usually to Hitchcock. His early thrillers weren’t so much thinly-veiled as shower-curtain-thin covers of Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho—replete with women in trouble, split personalities, uncanny doublings, and moody scores. For 1973’s Sisters, De Palma went so far as to employ Bernard Hermann, who worked on Hitchcock classics like Psycho. (Hermann did the strings for the shower scene that does in Janet Leigh.) This wasn’t plagiarism so much as pathological fandom.

Dressed to Kill is De Palma’s most shameless and loving remix of Psycho, replacing shower with elevator, and Janet Leigh with Angie Dickinson. While Leigh plays a secretary who makes off with funds from work to finance an affair, Dickinson plays an unsatisfied housewife who cheats on her husband. Both actresses are snuffed out early in their films’ running times, the better to startle their audiences. Star power usually guarantees more screen time.