Body Double | | Cast : | Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith | | Director : | Brian De Palma | | Studio : | Columbia/Tristar Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Dolby, Widescreen | | Released Date : | October 26, 1984 | | DVD Released Date : | June 01, 2004 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed), French (Subtitled), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 01, 2005 | | Summary | This is Pulp Movie Making! | Content
 | Great stuff that keeps the audience interested at all times. Can you say that about most movies? The plot is great, the acting is over the top, and the cinematography is fantastic. It has the feel of an 80s horror flick which means it doesn't take itself too seriously. It also feels like two movies in one. The first movie is sort of a voyeristic creepy movie with that 80s feel and the second half is a sordid mystery with that 80s feel. There's the 80s again! It's definitely worth a watch. Enjoy with a movie loving friend!
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| Rating | | | Date | July 21, 2005 | | Summary | DVD is fullscreen, not widescreen | Content
| The DVD actually contains a cropped fullscreen version of the film, not the original widescreen version.
[...] Body Double is currently only available in a fullscreen version.
My 4-star rating is for the film, not the DVD. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 28, 2005 | | Summary | Clever, And Doesn't Take Itself Too Seriously | Content
| "Holly keeps this business where it belongs." says a sleazy TV interviewer with a smile, "In the gutter." He's talking about Holly Body (Melanie Griffth), star of Holly Does Hollywood. She's a porn queen with a tattoo on her bottom. Holly, or at least the tattoo, is the key to Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) identifying the killer who set him up.
Jake is a struggling actor who suffers from claustrophobia. He's not too bright, not too dumb, and he finds out the hard way that his wife is two-timing him. She owns their house so he has to move out. He finds a place to stay, housesitting for an absent owner a modernist home on a stalk that overlooks Hollywood. The guy who helped him find the place points out the owner's telescope, which in the evening can pick out a lush neighbor, a rich woman named Gloria Revel, who regularly does a strip dance in front of her window. Jake thinks he sees her being stalked and does some stalking of his own. One night through the telescope he sees her being attacked. He races over to save her but he's too late. The attacker uses a big power drill to kill the woman. Jake finds himself under suspicion and sets out to try to find out what was going on. And that sets up his meeting with Holly, his realization of what really happened, and his confrontation with the killer who is in the process of burying Holly alive.
This is a first-rate movie, in my opinion. De Palma is often accused of ripping off...I mean, paying homage to...Hitchcock, but Hitchcock didn't own the suspense/humor genre. He just did it better than most. Here, De Palma has come up with a clever plot that builds a nice head of tension and unease. And using the plot device of a second-rate, struggling actor trying to get ahead and the practicalities of the porn business, he comes up with a number of incongruous and funny situations. When Holly matter of factly lists the things she doesn't do..."no animal acts, no water sports, no..." (it gets more graphic), it's almost endearing. De Palma spends a long sequence with Jake following Gloria after he notices the guy who is really stalking her. The sequence takes us to an underground parking lot, an exclusive shopping mall, to Gloria's home on the side of an ocean-front hill, to the beach and through a pedestrian tunnel. There is almost no dialogue but the sequence builds a lot of tension.
Craig Wasson does a nice job as Jake, and Melanie Griffith, with her little girl voice combined with Holly's practical but honest nature, is memorable as Holly Body. The movie is twenty years old and has held up, in my opinion, very well. The DVD picture looks great. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 26, 2005 | | Summary | Stylish But Silly | Content
| One part VERTIGO, one part REAR WINDOW, a splash of DIAL M FOR MURDER, a garnish of NORTH BY NORTHWEST. The resulting mixture is the 1984 film BODY DOUBLE, which is often described as an homage to legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. But in truth, the word 'homage' is scarcely applicable; writer-director Brian De Palma doesn't so much reference Hitchcock as he simply steals everything that isn't nailed down. The end result is a stylish but silly film that is much more interesting for the films it mimics than it is in and of itself.
A down and out and neurotically claustrophobic actor, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), lucks into the cushy job of housesitter for a lavish Los Angeles bachelor pad complete with a round and rotating bed. It also comes with a view: just peek into the handy telescope and there she is, a beautiful woman who has the compulsive need to dance naked in front of open windows in a house not far away. Needless to say, Scully is fascinated by her--but he soon finds that he is not her only audience. She is being stalked by a gruesome-looking native American. Can he find a way to save her life, not to mention win her love? Well... let's just say I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
The cast ranges from adequate (Wasson) to intriguing (Deborah Shelton) to extremely good (Melanie Griffith in a star-making role), and De Palma demonstrates considerable wit and not a little style. But there is a basic problem here. Brian De Palma isn't Alfred Hitchcock, and his wholesale imitation of Hitchcock devices and themes is simply that: an imitation.
There a fair amount of sex and more than a few dollops of sly comedy, and it is really here where De Palma endows the film with his own special brand of style. The rest, including one of the most ridiculously improbable murders ever to hit the screen, drowns in its own detail. Throughout his career De Palma made several notable suspense films that were inspired by Hitchcock, most particularly DRESSED TO KILL and BLOW OUT, but he was trying way too hard on this one.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
In Memory of Ellen R. Smith, 1920-2005
Virtuoso Pianist and Good Friend |
| Rating | | | Date | April 19, 2005 | | Summary | look at me and see | Content
| De Palma has done it again with Body Double, making a roller coaster ride through the many passage ways of vouerism.Beatiful and clever and poetic and one of his best films along with Blow Up and Dressed To Kill. Reccomended. |
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