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PLEASE NOTE: Michael D's is currently in READ ONLY MODE. Anything submitted will simply not be written to the database.
Lots of stuff is still broken, but at least reviews can now be looked up and read.
Body Double (1984)

Body Double (1984)

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Released 14-Mar-2000

Cover Art

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Details At A Glance

General Extras
Category Thriller Biographies-Cast & Crew
Theatrical Trailer
Dolby Digital Trailer-City
Rating Rated R
Year Of Production 1984
Running Time 109:36
RSDL / Flipper No/No Cast & Crew
Start Up Menu
Region Coding 2,4 Directed By Brian De Palma
Studio
Distributor

Sony Pictures Home Entertain
Starring Craig Wasson
Gregg Henry
Melanie Griffith
Case Brackley-Trans-No Lip
RPI $34.95 Music Pino Donaggio


Video Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame None English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
French Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (192Kb/s)
German Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio 1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
16x9 Enhanced
Video Format 576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio 1.85:1 Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures No
Subtitles English
German
French
Dutch
Spanish
Italian
Portuguese
Czech
Danish
Finnish
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Norwegian
Polish
Swedish
Turkish
Smoking No
Annoying Product Placement No
Action In or After Credits Yes, during credits

NOTE: The Profanity Filter is ON. Turn it off here.

Plot Synopsis

    The last Brian De Palma film that I had witnessed on VHS many moons before I obtained a DVD player was Snake Eyes. Now, I didn't think Snake Eyes was too bad, except for the fact that everyone in it seemed to talk in paragraphs. However, the action and the cast managed to make up for this annoyance. Body Double, on the other hand, does not even have that much going for it. At no moment in this film did I actually feel like I was actually watching anything with a story, rather that I was watching some kind of poorly executed spoof. Anyway, for those of you who want a plot, here it goes: Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) is an actor with one serious problem in that he's rather severely claustrophobic. He also appears to have the sex drive of a manic rabbit, as he obsessively follows Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton) around in the hope of getting off with her. During the initial stages of his voyeuristic desire, he simply watches Gloria strip through a telescope in a fellow out-of-work actor's apartment, a la Rear Window. Then, after a less-than-successful meeting with her, he reverts back to spying on her through the telescope, where he is unfortunate enough to witness an attack on her person. He races around to her house in the hope of saving her life, only to be attacked by her dog as she is being murdered.

    From there, he delves into the world of porno filmmaking for reasons I can only guess at. I mean, think about it in a logical fashion for a second: the object of your desire is murdered, you see this awful looking blonde in a porn film, and suddenly you decide that the two must be connected in some manner. You then rush off to start a career in pornographic films, in the hope of getting some answers as to what motivated the crime, not to mention a chance to get your grubby hands on the perpetrator. As Jake dives into this world, he meets up with a cardboard cut-out posing as a porn actress by the name of Holly Body (Melanie Griffith). To go into the film any further here would be traumatic to me, but suffice to say that there's plenty of violence and hot sex from this point onwards. By the time we get to an explanation of the actual story, most sane people will have ceased to care.

    Not surprisingly, the only lead actor in this tragic load of slop who had a real career afterwards was Melanie Griffith, and the career she had after this film was not what you'd call a particularly remarkable one. The cast listing on the packaging would have you believe that Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue fame is a star in this film. He gets maybe all of fifteen minutes screen time in this film, if that. All in all, this has to have one of the most poorly executed plots and hysterically bad acting I've ever witnessed. In the end, this all seems to become a film about how an actor overcomes his claustrophobia rather than anything with any real interest. If there is one great thing about this film, it is that it is just so hard to take seriously. The packaging would have us believe that this is supposed to be some kind of erotic thriller, but I cannot help but get the feeling that director Brian De Palma was laughing his bum off all the way through making this film.

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Transfer Quality

Video

    The film is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, with 16x9 enhancement. I would like to be able to tell you that this is a wonderful transfer with the best possible quality, in order to make up for the drudgery of the story. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a lot of problems introduced in the transfer to video, and within the first twenty-five minutes, the film suffers from major bouts of telecine wobble. As Deborah Shelton performs a little striptease in front of the telescope, the image begins to exhibit what appears to be a major bout of wobbling which I would not attribute to any choice on the part of the director. As if to confirm my suspicion that this is a real problem with the transfer, the artefact refused to show in the next series of telescope shots. Shadow detail is distinctly average, although it is generally easy to make out all the main details that are the central focus of the camera. When the camera pans to a new perspective or subject, however, night-time details become lost in a blur of shadows.

    Strong fluorescent lights become a blur of white, lacking in any distinction as an object. However, if there was an area where this film truly showed its age, it was in the colours. The colour scheme is muted and drab to the point where it looks more like an animation using a series of oil paintings, and after nearly two hours of this kind of video quality, I had a similar feeling to that which would come from watching a Days Of Our Lives marathon. However, this would appear to have more to do with the film that was used in 1984 rather than being any fault of the transfer. MPEG artefacts were mostly absent from the presentation, although details in objects distant from the camera were lost. Whether this is the result of the MPEG encoding or the logistics in the original photography is a moot point because some of the scenes where this occurs suffer for it quite a lot. However, most of the film is shot with bright lighting. The most likely problem is that you're going to find the picture blurring as your eyes start to close in a reflex of sheer boredom.

Audio

    Although I'd like to be able to say that we have a textbook conversion with the audio portion of this transfer, it is pretty ordinary, even by the standards of early 1980s films such as Ghostbusters and Caddyshack. The sound comes in four languages that are encoded in Dolby Digital 2.0 with surround encoding (English, German, Italian, and Spanish), and a fifth language that has been encoded in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (French). Because this film quickly lost my interest, I listened to the default English soundtrack without even making the effort to check out the Spanish and German audio tracks like I normally do in order to satisfy curiosity. Like the video transfer, I felt that this was very ordinary for a large proportion of the time. The surround channels were used in a fashion that reminded me a lot of Dolby Pro-Logic encoded VHS tapes. Not that this was necessarily bad, but it did result in a slightly artificial quality to the dialogue and music.

    In spite of that artificial feel, the dialogue was clean and easy to understand throughout the film. The only times when it was not perfectly clear was when one of the main characters, usually Scully, was muttering something that wasn't meant to be understood. Some listeners will have a little trouble fully understanding the lines spoken by Deborah Shelton, but I am not amongst their number. Essentially, any losses in clarity of the dialogue can be attributed to the director's intentions. Audio sync was not a problem on either player, although I guess I would have to use a Pioneer player to really tell if there were any problems - suffice to say that non-Pioneer equipment will not have a problem with this dialogue. It is so banal at some points that sync problems might actually make it more interesting.

    The only memorable piece of music in this film was the song Relax, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It appears for about three minutes in a sequence where Scully is wandering around a nightclub with some unsavoury characters (I believe parts of this sequence were used to comprise their music video, in fact). This, more than anything, is what dates this film beyond the point of no return. Contrary to what some people might believe, Frankie Goes To Hollywood were the first commercial band to become the focus of a computer game all the way back in 1984, with Michael Jackson and The Spice Girls following suit years later. This five minute sequence is really the only memorable portion of the film.

    The surround channels yawned occasionally at the limited amount of work they were given, and the subwoofer basically twiddled its thumbs for two hours. This is very much a frontal mix, and it couldn't be clearer from this sound and the aforementioned video problems that this DVD was rushed to release. A little more time and effort for a 5.1 remix would have worked wonders for the entertainment value here.

Extras

    The extras are very poorly set out and of little value. The Dolby Digital City trailer is located on this disc, and is probably the best thing on it.

Menu

    The menu is your standard 4:3 Columbia fare. The problem is that loading it on my Toshiba player is a very slow and laborious process with the main menu taking as long as thirty seconds to load when the disc is inserted. I only hope that future duplication runs are not affected by this problem.

Theatrical Trailer

    The theatrical trailer is presented at an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 with 16x9 enhancement and Dolby Digital 2.0 audio. It is about as remarkable as the movie it is for.

Cast & Crew Biographies

    Your standard biographies about the only recognizable performers in the show, and the stars.

R4 vs R1

NOTE: To view non-R4 releases, your equipment needs to be multi-zone compatible and usually also NTSC compatible.

    The Region 1 version of this DVD appears to be identically featured to the Region 4 version.

Summary

    Body Double is an ordinary film presented on a DVD with some quality control issues.

    The video quality is average at best, and enough to give you a headache at worst.

    The audio quality is pretty ordinary.

    The extras are very ordinary.

Ratings (out of 5)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Dean McIntosh (Don't talk about my bio. We don't wanna know.)
Wednesday, February 09, 2000
Review Equipment
DVDToshiba SD-2109, using S-Video output
DisplaySamsung CS-823AMF (80cm). This display device is 16x9 capable. This display device has a maximum native resolution of 576i (PAL).
Audio DecoderBuilt in to amplifier/receiver.
AmplificationSony STR DE-835
SpeakersPanasonic S-J1500D Front Speakers, Sharp CP-303A Back Speakers, Philips FB206WC Centre Speaker, JBL Digital 10 Subwoofer

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