Wonderful Movie

Who payed the critics

Too much of everything

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

A young actor's obsession with spying on a beautiful woman who lives nearby leads to a baffling series of events with drastic consequences. Body Double benefits from a strong perfomance from Craig Wasson but also an interesting plot and twists that i didn't see them coming. The soundtrack is also so 80's that it hurts plus Melanie Griffith does a good job as well. Now as far as flaws go? some twists weren't that good like the one before the big climax, the murder sequence seemed like it took forever to be filmed and some scenes (mostly with Griffith and the Pet Shop Boys sequence were a little bit? weird) but overall not a bad movie but not one of De Palma's best either. (7.5/10)

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.

One of Brian De Palma's masterpieces and yet one that is grossly underrated. It's amazing how, even in this day and age, (see "The Neon Deomn"), critics still tend to judge films on content rather than on style or technique and "Body Double" is style personified. He was still paying homage to Hitchcock, (in this case both "Rear Window" and "Vertigo") and he still tended to use actors who were somewhat limited in their abilities, (the exception being the extraordinary Melanie Griffith who won the National Society of Film Critics Best Supporting Actress prize), but the set pieces are sublime and the suspense sequences are beautifully handled. Essential.

1984's "Body Double" isn't the best film of Brian De Palma still it's a tease of mystery and suspense all blended with sex and a creep tease to make it a watch even if it does seem like a parody of the Hitchcock films.You have Jake(Craig Wasson)a real Bill Maher look a like! who's a struggling actor who can only find work in Hollywood in B movie flicks, and the only way he can get thru life is to drink Jack Daniels! One day he's asked to house-sit at a beautiful hillside Hollywood apartment of a friend. And this would turn from some eye candy fun to a bloody view of murder! Jake has a telescopic peak into the bedroom of an actress named Gloria and night after night a striptease is given and thru the scope a third party is viewed by Jake and that's a crazy looking man who's a stalker! Soon this leads to a bloody murder and it opens up an underworld of X-rated film and porn for Jake as a woman by the name of Holly Body(Melanie Griffith)may hold the key to the truth of it all. Still this film despite it's suspense and erotic thriller themes takes an unexpected twist it's like it's a parody of a film within a film! Still this is a nice eye candy treat and a good watch clearly an 80's classic.