Too much of everything

Must See Movie...

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

While Brian De Palma's BODY DOUBLE taps adeptly into its hetero-normative erotic thrust, in post-mortem, its central plot fits right into a cracking-a-nut-with-a-sledgehammer case that if the nefarious perpetrator simply needs an eye-witness for his purported burglary-turned-murder skulduggery, he really wouldn't have concocted such an involute set-up to pull the wool over the eyes of our protagonist, Jack Scully (Wasson), a struggling actor in Hollywood afflicted by claustrophobia. So what De Palma blatantly exploits down pat is the libidinous bent and voyeuristic tantalization mostly derived from the straight male demography, plundering Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO no end, BODY DOUBLE's misbegotten plot is at first a thoroughgoing manifestation of female objectification through man's wish-fulfillment, as if in real world, a luscious woman really enjoys putting on such a show for no one's gratification but herself, also the camp choice from a telephone cord to an electric drill in terms of the murder weapon in the archly designed gore climax does writ large a wicked sign of its times and De Palma's thinly-veiled mean-spiritness. Jack Scully is hare-brained enough to not suspect something bizarre is afoot right from the start, but the same can be referred to the culprit, so inimitable is the seductive routine that he must hire the porn star who invents it to do the same performance, and thanks to the slipshod prosthetics wearing by the ghastly-looking "Indian", any sharp-eyed spectator can more or less guess who is underneath that halfway through the journey, ergo, thrill is drained by half. Having said that, Melanie Griffith does hold court in her breakthrough performance as the titular double, who only makes her appearance in the second half but charmingly weds immaculate allure with an air of nonchalance in her trademark cooing articulation, the paradigm of a woman in the eyes of her opposite sex beholder. Ultimately, the takeaway of the film is exclusively ocular apart from Griffith's grand entrance, the strikingly futuristic dwelling Chemosphere and a vampy music video of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's RELAX are here to stay, but as for De Palma's facility, that Dutch-angle tunnel-vision might be any viewer's best shot.

Brian De Palma has often been labelled a director who rips off Alfred Hitchcock. I really don't mind his lifts myself as it seems to me that he takes this stuff and reconfigures it into something new, something uniquely his own. It has to be said that with Body Double he goes full pelt with the Hitchcock lifts like never before; to the point it really feels like he did it to antagonise his detractors. In this one there are very blatant nods to Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958) in particular. Not only this, but he also seems to be parodying his own films here as well, with the final shower sequence surely a reference to the notorious shower scene in Dressed to Kill (1980) which was edited in such a way to make Angie Dickinson look like she had the body of a Playboy Playmate! Not only this but with Body Double De Palma included a notorious sequence of extreme violence which was a further nose thumb at critics who decried the heavy violence in both Dressed to Kill and Scarface (1983). As a consequence of all this, I find Body Double to be a very playful and knowing film from De Palma. Consequently, it is highly entertaining stuff.The story is wilfully artificial, with a thriller story-line which I unfortunately found quite easy to predict. It involves an unsuccessful actor with claustrophobia who is offered a luxurious futuristic apartment to live in temporarily after splitting from his girlfriend; from here he is the witness to strange ominous goings on involving his beautiful neighbour who has a habit of dancing semi-nude in open view. It's a story which taps into the voyeur in us all.The things I really like about De Palma is his taste for excessive content with an unapologetic style-over-substance approach. To this end, we have a story with severe fluctuations in tone, from the melodramatic, nastily violent, highly eroticised and moments of extreme weirdness. It is all, needless to say, highly stylish in presentation, with trademark fluid camera-work and long stretches of dialogue-free sequences where image alone tells the story and an effectively lush soundtrack adding additional flavour. In some respects this is a De Palma film turned up to volume 11, with lots of nudity, an excessively violent murder scene, overly dramatic acting from the main character, dream-like border-line surreal moments and an extended scene involving a porn star played by Melanie Griffiths played out as a music video to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'Relax' including an appearance by singer Holly Johnson! Not only this but it's a film which both begins and ends on comic film-within-a-film sequences which only serve to accentuate the artificial bizarreness even further. De Palma was one of the very few A-List Hollywood directors who made films whose directorial style and no-holds barred content have earned them the label 'cult film'. Well, with Body Double I am going to go out on a limb and declare this his most culty film of all! It is not a film for those who equate movies to social responsibility and good taste but for those of us who like them for unashamed entertainment value, this ticks many boxes.

Body Double shows the ugly, moral tawdriness of the bottom rungs of the Los Angeles acting scene. When we first meet Jake he's in danger of being fired from Z-grade horror film. De Palma has crafted a beautifully structured thriller with a mystery that we piece together along with Jake. The story is suspenseful, mysterious, touches on Vampire and porn film-making, and conveniently provides sex as the substitute for drama. Controversial movies like this always result in a lot of contradictory feedbacks.The plot revolves around a failing actor (who could use some serious couch time, if you know what I mean), who becomes obsessed with "the girl next door" - a sexy neighbor whose 'jones' for late-night dancing in the "all-together" and abhorrence for window blinds makes house-sitting worth the lousy pay. And as we've seen in dozens of erotic thrillers, someone dies, someone is accused, and our hero must save the girl and get the bad guy. Nice twists along the way keep this one very intriguing. A spectacularly hot, 28 year old Melanie Griffith, who about steals the movie and registers a "'10' on the peter meter" whenever she's on-screen. Sure, there are elements of real, American "cheese" here; leaps in logic (the plot tenuously hinges on a couple "convenient" things happening at just the right time) and an overall "over-the-top" feel will turn some viewers off and have them scrambling for the remote. But Body Double is truly one of those late night cable classics that many have duplicated, but few have surpassed. It has just enough art, just enough schlock and just enough brains to keep your attention - and did I mention Melanie Griffith? Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

Brian De Palma really goes off the deep end here; the scene with Frankie Goes To Hollywood is the one that illustrates this best. It's like a music video within a film, like the film seems to be a statement within a dirty confession, or possibly a comment on De Palma's working with Hitchcock, or maybe... I'm really not sure. Then there's porn, exhibitionism, agoraphobia, voyeurism... the list seems endless. God bless De Palma, if only for trying.Craig Wasson's acting is terrible, though. I've tried thinking up why or how (t)his sort of amateurism would fit in some way, but I end up pretty much blank (he's been working before and since a lot, so maybe I should check out some more work he did). And yet, somehow, it's also as if there's no one else that could have done a better job... if you understand what I'm talking about, please explain it to me.By the way, (Melanie) Griffith, (Dennis) Franz and (Gregg) Henry do terrific jobs in this B-film piece of art. And (Deborah) Shelton plays 'the beauty' well enough.A beaut of a film, though it leaves me conflicted just as much. 8 out of 10 seems fair enough.