With every rewatch (and there have been many) Body Double inches closer and closer to being my favourite De Palma movie. Maybe it’s because this is very much a Greatest Hits collection, combining and elaborating on all of De Palma’s obsessions, desires, visual motifs and set-pieces up to this point and displaying them as gorgeous, lurid splash pages in a porno-snuff magazine. The cinematography is so slick, capturing an art-deco-rendered 80s LA as both sun-bleached city of plastic dreams and nocturnally black netherworld of nightmares and debauchery. No amount of hammy acting can take away from De Palma’s A-grade craft and note-perfect B-movie satire. This deranged vision of genre-bled Hollywood horror that also finds time for a porn-flick rendition of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” – presented as a music video no less – might just be my cinematic ideal.

Watched on Indicator blu-ray