Synopsis
After losing an acting role and his girlfriend, Jake Scully finally catches a break: he gets offered a gig house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills. While peering through the beautiful home's telescope one night, he spies a gorgeous woman dancing in her window. But when he witnesses the girl's murder, it leads Scully through the netherworld of the adult entertainment industry on a search for answers—with porn actress Holly Body as his guide.
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Cast
- Craig WassonJake Scully
- Melanie GriffithHolly Body
- Gregg HenrySam Bouchard
- Deborah SheltonGloria Revelle
- Guy BoydDet. Jim McLean
- Dennis FranzRubin
- David HaskellDrama Teacher
- Rebecca StanleyKimberly Hess
- Al IsraelCorso
- Douglas WarhitVideo Salesman
Recommendations
- 100
Slant Magazine
Body Double, while not his finest, is the best candidate as De Palma’s signature film. It’s a wicked, feature-length double entendre from a Doublemint era. Take it at face value, take it for its prurience or take it for all it’s worth. Hell, try taking on all three at once. - 91
The Film Stage
De Palma’s exuberant style comes to perfect use when dream and reality become thus entwined: as soon as Jake and Gloria’s lips meet, the camera starts encircling the couple frenetically, as though struggling to capture this spiral of pure pleasure, while a green screen projection of the beach replaces the real one. - 90
The Telegraph
Body Double isn’t trash, misogynistic or otherwise. It’s unrepentantly trashy – not the kind of film you watch while your parents or kids are in the house, or with your curtains open. But it’s also a complex, provocative suspense thriller that bears comparison with the three immaculate Hitchcock classics – Vertigo, Psycho and Rear Window – it gleefully drags through the sludge. - 90
The New York Times
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. - 90
Chicago Reader
Brian De Palma has gotten a bad rap on this one: the first hour of his 1984 thriller represents the most restrained, accomplished, and effective filmmaking he's ever done, and if the film does become more jokey and incontinent as it follows its derivative path, it never entirely loses the goodwill De Palma engenders with his deft opening sequences. - 88
Chicago Sun-Times
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. - 70
Time Out London
De Palma actually has the gall to combine the plots from both Vertigo and Rear Window in one big voyeur-fest and pull it off with a certain sly efficiency. - 60
Empire
Once you get past the ridiculous story this is a fine example of De Palma's lush overkill style and certainly has a redeeming thread of silly sick humour.
