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.

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.

After struggling actor Jake Scully finds his girlfriend in bed with another man, he moves out and accepts an offer from fellow struggling actor Sam Bouchard to house-sit for a few weeks. Apart from getting to live in an ultramodern house, he also get to watch a neighbour do a sexy dance in front of her window every night at exactly the same time. He becomes infatuated, following her around and eventually meeting her. She also has another admirer however and while watching her one night through his telescope, Jake sees her murdered by this other man. The police are dubious about what he claims to have seen, but the case takes a bizarre turn when, while watching TV, he sees a porn star do the exact same dance he had watched for all those nights. He soon realises he has been an unwitting accomplice in a complex plot.De Palma has always referenced Hitchcock in his movies, and here, it's his rear window, and the concept is as bonkers and as brilliant as the decade it was made in.There are many interpretations of the films narrative, and this is why it demands repeat viewings. Is it all in Jakes head while he is suffering his bout of claustrophobia? So the only parts of the film that are real are the initial scene with him in the coffin, and then him being helped out of the coffin. After all, the majority of the film is almost dreamlike, thanks to the wonderful eye De Palma has, most noticeably the scene in the shopping mall where Jake sees the Indian following his victim from afar.The film can be seen as a wonderful epitaph to the decade that fashion, music and taste forgot, and no matter how garish the make up, clothes and sets are, it just adds so much t the narrative.It's a definite conversation piece, there are plot holes aplenty, but this just adds to the argument of where reality ends and the subconscious starts in the films narrative.And it also adds much evidence to my theory that 1984 was the best year for movies ever.It's a bonkers piece for sure, but it's thrilling, and never let's up the craziness.Essential viewing.

"Look," a movie director (Dennis Franz) frankly says to his leading actor, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson). "I got a picture to make here. I got 25 days to make it. I have no time to wait around for a claustrophobic vampire who freezes every time he lays down in a coffin."Scully is a young, struggling actor, good-looking, nice enough, but just passable when it comes to star power. He has landed a leading role as a vampire, true, but it's only a B-picture. One can hope for the best as he dons gaudy, glittery eye makeup and a pair of fangs that makes Bela Lugosi seem like a Dardenne Brothers figure. His staggering claustrophobia only makes things worse.As his professional life limps along, things only get worse when Scully discovers his girlfriend in bed with another man, which, in response, leave him homeless and alone. A fellow actor (Gregg Henry) offers him the chance to stay at his house for a few days, a house of fiendish tackiness that sits on top of a hill and looks like the Seattle Space Needle had a baby with a spaceship. Across the way is a mansion inhabited by a stunningly beautiful woman (Deborah Shelton) — Scully is able to watch her undress as his friend has equipped a telescope overlooking the balcony.If you've had a filling serving of Alfred Hitchcock movies, I'm sure you can only guess where the film is going. Body Double is Rear Window junior and Vertigo the second, except with a lot more blood, sex, nudity, and enough tawdriness to top off a jumbo sized popcorn bin. One night, as Scully peeps on his new neighbor performing her nightly striptease, he notices a deformed looking man perched on the satellite dish in front of her home, watching her with a sadistic thirst in his eyes. Skip to a few days later, the woman is brutally murdered in her bedroom, with Scully as the sole witness. The police (of course) laugh at him, passing him off as a paranoid pervert. But his neighbor's death leads him to a number of startling discoveries, the most shocking turning toward the world of pornography, where he enlists the help of actress Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) to find out the truth in the bizarre slaughter.Hitchcock had a fascination with hot blondes, armed-and-dangerous camera angles, and ever-present danger. Brian De Palma, billed as the Master of the Macabre in his heyday, likes all that, but he doesn't want to turn himself into a carbon copy of cinema's most predominant suspense filmmaker. De Palma's own Dressed to Kill, Sisters, and Blow Out (let's stop talking about Carrie and Scarface for a minute) were jaw-dropping in their stylistic dexterity, their stories borderline ridiculous yet efficient when connected with such unique visuals.Body Double is no different, even if it is sillier than some of De Palma's other efforts (which is saying something, considering Dressed to Kill gave the then 49-year old Angie Dickinson a blatantly obvious 20- something year-old body double, put Michael Caine in drag, and ended with a was that all just a dream? startler). The plot twists are sometimes inane, and sometimes too coincidental to truly be stunning, but De Palma is so self-assured that it isn't hard to make us want to just go with it. I have been purposefully vague when retelling plot points because so much of the film's success lies in its slimy thrills, but the style is something worth noting — Body Double shows the director at his optical peak. Early in the film, Scully, sensing his neighbor is in trouble, follows her to a Los Angeles mall, her actual soon-to-be attacker lurking in every nook and cranny. In the past, De Palma has payed great attention to split-screens and close-ups, but the entire sequence is notable for its remarkable combination of voyeurism and open space. There are three buzz characters moving around the complex all at once, with the camera sometimes peering onto them from above, most impressively when they walk on different floors. Without much dialogue to back it up, the scene rattles with tension. Will danger catch up in this game of cat-and-mouse?There are even more visual kicks (particularly the simultaneously laughable yet hugely ingenious moment where Scully and his neighbor run into each other, after he's been following her around for hours, embrace in fiery passion, the camera spinning around them with merry-go-round delirium), but the theme of voyeurism in Body Double is what makes the film such a wild experience. It's almost always uncomfortable — in every scene, you feel as if you shouldn't be there, as if you're intruding on something deeply private. The storyline may not always be strong (or even truly believable), but Body Double is about style, tone and mood. In that sense, it's more than convincing.Read more reviews at petersonreviews.com