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De Palma runs parallel with Body Double, Larry Cohen scrapes the luscious veneer for the nerves beneath. Ingénue adrift and "whacked-out director," not Tinseltown but Manhattan, a realm of ripe reflexivity. The housewife from Oklahoma as red-white-and-blue cheesecake, Zoë Lund tinted blonde like Marilyn, or Dorothy Stratten or Frances Farmer. When her husband (Brad Rijn) comes searching for her, she retreats into the lethal mise en scène of a SoHo boudoir. "Real death, make-believe death" blur on the Moviola of the fallen auteur (Eric Bogosian), her corpse turns up in Coney Island and hubby is arrested and sprung for the dramatization. "I'm used to working out of sequence." A requiem for New Hollywood, a pleasing arabesque. The Salvation Army brunette gets the acting bug, thus a double dose of Lund's coruscating strangeness, her clash with the bereft widower is catnip for the murderous cinéaste. The Cohen specialty of guerrilla location shooting mixes with brazen artifice, "is any place real when you're making movies?" Powell's Peeping Tom, Aldrich's The Legend of Lylah Clare, Rush's The Stunt Man... and "Honest Abe" Zapruder. The overhead screen is filled with starlet portraits, the megalomaniac steps on them. Oneiric sleaze, synthesizer cry, scum-bucket Pirandello. Celluloid strips make handy strangulation ropes, don't they? The thorny rose on the satin pillow, "production values," the camera behind the mirror. The happy ending is that a family is just another illusory construct, the finished production is signed by the police detective tagging along as technical adviser. "We just make it up and then we make it happen." Ferrara takes it from there with Dangerous Game. With Kevin O'Connor, Bill Oland, H. Richard Greene, Steven Pudenz, and Kitty Summerall.
--- Fernando F. Croce |