Body Double 1984 BrRip Avi Lee1001

Body Double 1984 BrRip Avi Lee1001

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086984/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Double_(film)
Body Double is an American thriller film first released on 26th October 1984, directed by Brian De Palma. The film stars Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry, Deborah Shelton and Guy Boyd.Our overall rating for Body Double is: good.

De Palma's sleazfest is debatable whether it is an homage to the Master, or downright theft. Combining elements of both of Hitchcock's classic films Vertigo and Rear Window - it drums in a modern voyeur-complex with liberal doses of nudity, violence and sexuality.

Body Double" is an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking, a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition in which there's no particular point except that the hero is flawed, weak, and in terrible danger -- and we identify with him completely. The movie is so cleverly constructed, with the emphasis on visual storytelling rather than dialogue, that we are neither faster nor slower than the hero as he gradually figures out the scheme that has entrapped him. And the casting of a Hitchcockian average guy also helps.

The movie stars Craig Wasson, an open-faced actor with an engaging smile, as its hero, an unemployed actor named Jake. He isn't smart, he isn't dumb, he isn't perfect, he isn't bad. He is an ideal choice to set up as a witness to a murder. Jake needs a place to stay, and another actor (Gregg Henry) offers him a job house-sitting in a weird, modernistic home on stilts up in the hills above Los Angeles. The other actor also points out all the sights -- including a shapely neighbor who does a nightly striptease dance in front of her open window. Jake is only human. For two nights, he uses a telescope to watch the striptease. He also begins to suspect that the woman may be in danger. In sequences inspired by "Rear Window," he begins to follow the woman (Deborah Shelton), but he keeps his distance because he's caught in the same dilemma as James Stewart was in the Hitchcock picture: He is, after all, technically a Peeping Tom, and he wouldn't know the woman was in danger if he hadn't been breaking the law.

Since the plot is so important in "Body Double," and because the movie contains so many nice surprises, I won't reveal very much more of the story. Let me describe in a carefully vague way, however, some of the pleasures of the movie. After a murder does indeed seem to have been committed, Jake's path leads him into the world of pornographic filmmaking. He wants to meet and hire a porno superstar (Melanie Griffith) who he thinks can help him figure out the mystery. His attempts lead to a series of very funny conversations, as the blond porno actress talks to him with a Runyonesque mixture of jaded sophistication and startling ignorance. The speech in which she explains exactly what she will, and will not, do in a movie is shocking, sad, and curiously moving.

"Body Double"'s excursion into the world of pornography (we see some fairly mild porno scenes, shot by De Palma himself) is part of a veritable anthology of styles in this movie. The film opens with a satire on vampire movies, includes a Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse sequence, and even borrows some of the clichés of 1940s thrillers, including a detailed recapitulation at the end, complete with flashbacks. There is also a sharp 1940s look to the cinematography, which uses dramatic lighting, tilted cameras, and carefully constructed shots to make the style part of the story.

But the movie is not just an exercise in style. It is also a genuinely terrifying thriller, in which an almost clockwork plot brings the hero and the killer together without a single logical glitch. De Palma is at home in this genre. Although his "Scarface" was more of a serious social commentary, thrilling suspense movies are his specialty, and his credits include "Carrie," "Obsession," and "Dressed to Kill." With "Body Double," he has his most airtight plot. He also has, once again, his almost unique courage to go over the top -- to push scenes beyond the edge of common sense and into cheerfully heightened and impassioned overkill. The burial sequence next to the Hollywood reservoir, for example, or the photography in the tunnel during one of Jake's attacks of claustrophobia, are so uninhibited that they skirt the dangerous edge of being ridiculous. But because the story's so strong, they're not. They work.

October 26, 1984
FILM: DEPALMA EVOKES 'VERTIGO' IN BODY DOUBLE
By VINCENT CANBY

BRIAN DE PALMA goes too far, which may be not only the most consistent quality through all his films but also the most important and, possibly, the most endearing. Each of his films is guaranteed to offend some of the people all of the time, including his staunchest admirers. He never leaves well enough alone.

He's someone at an otherwise friendly dinner party who can't keep himself from saying the one thing that will infuriate everybody. It's as if he were daring the host to ask him back.

Mr. De Palma's early, independently made comedies, including ''Hi, Mom'' and ''Greetings,'' set standards for informed rudeness and bad taste that many of us continue to remember with fondness. When he turned to horror films, his ebullient satire occasionally put off the very audiences for which the films were supposedly made, though the on- screen demolition of John Cassavetes' head in ''The Fury'' set a standard for sheer gore that other, less talented directors are still imitating.

His ''Dressed to Kill'' and ''Blow Out'' unashamedly quoted from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and when last year he remade ''Scarface,'' he couldn't resist ending it with a comic- book Gotterdammerung that produced helpless laughter in part of the audience and outrage in everyone else.

''Body Double,'' opening today at the United Artists Twin and other theaters, again goes too far, which is the reason to see it. It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film (''Vertigo''), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies.

The new film, written by Robert J. Avrech and Mr. De Palma, is a murder mystery that has the effect of sending up the kind of sleaziness that Paul Schrader found so solemnly significant in ''American Gigolo.'' It's about Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), an aspiring but none too promising Hollywood actor who, when first seen, is in process of being fired from his first big break, playing an androgynous vampire in a third-rate horror flick.

Jake's problem is that he has claustrophobia and panics every time he has to climb into his movie coffin. When he gets home that afternoon he finds his girlfriend in bed with another man. That's bad enough but, as he reports later, she was positively glowing. Says the morose Jake, ''She never glowed with me.''

Having no place to live, Jake accepts a house-sitting offer from Sam (Gregg Henry), a fellow actor who's off for a job in Seattle. It's not exactly an ordinary house. It perches like a giant spaceship atop a cement column on a hillside overlooking Los Angeles. It also comes equipped with a high-powered telescope and something very special to watch.

Each night at the same hour, as Sam shows Jake, the beautiful, dark- haired young woman in the house just below puts on a sort of modified, one- woman porn show, possibly knowing that telescopes all over the neighborhood are trained on her.

Night after night Jake watches for the pleasure of it - he's a far less respectable Peeping Tom than the one played by James Stewart in ''Rear Window.'' In time Jake falls in love with the woman who is, it turns out, a battered wife whose name is Gloria (Deborah Shelton). Jake also comes to realize that someone else is watching Gloria and that, indeed, someone is out to murder her.

It's difficult to say any more about the story without giving away its secrets, though ''Body Double'' does give one of its main secrets away rather sooner than it means to.

However, the film's secrets are not as important to one's enjoyment as the spectacle of poor Jake's dogged pursuit of answers, a journey that introduces him to the world of porn films. In particular, it introduces him to Holly (Melanie Griffith), a pretty, model-thin, absolutely up-front porn actress who has some of the comic candor of a contemporary Billie Dawn in a punk hairdo.

Mr. Wasson (''Four Friends'') is extremely good as Jake, a guy whose code of honor doesn't prevent him from accepting a job in a porn film in order to get to the bottom of the mystery. In spite of his actions, Jake goes through these adventures radiating down-home decency, which is funny for being so out of place. Miss Shelton hasn't a great deal to do but she is a lovely victim, even when Mr. De Palma upstages her and Mr. Wasson by photographing them in their first - and last - embrace in one of those lyrical, 360-degree pan-shots that prompt laughter for the way they so brazenly evoke Hitchcock.

Though she comes into ''Body Double'' quite late - initially as the star of a film-within-the-film titled ''Holly Does Hollywood'' - Miss Griffith is the movie's real focal point. The daughter of Tippi Hedren, of Hitchcock's ''Birds,'' Miss Griffith gives a perfectly controlled comic performance that successfully neutralizes all questions relating to plausibility. She's not exactly new to films, having played in ''Night Moves,'' ''Smile'' and ''The Drowning Pool'' as a very young actress. What is new is the self- assured screen presence she demonstrates here, and it's one of the delights of ''Body Double.''

Note: It's not necessary to be a Hitchcock student to enjoy ''Body Double,'' and not for nothing is the film rated R.
Is Body Double Brian De Palma's most underrated film or merely a guilty pleasure on my part? Naturally, I make the case for the former.
Another sexed-up Hitchcockian thriller from Brian De Palma. Plays much better today than it did in 1984.

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