I have a few trans friends. My "best" friend who is trans is very sensitive about this subject and I can tell this movie would make him extremely mad. But I love it. It's so insanely 80's, and 70's, and everything in between. When I saw Body Double, I thought it was insane and 80's. It had a fucking music video in it for christ sake! But this, this is equally insane!
We begin with intense amounts of nudity as our screen vixen Angeline Dickenson as Kate masturbates in the shower. She gets raped from behind, and wakes to have actual sex with her husband... Okay! Great beginning! She is in an unhappy marriage, fantasizing about other men, going to therapy with therapist Michael Caine, and she has a fleeting encounter with a stranger she meets in a museum. Then, as if this movie needed to get stranger, she is murdered 30 minutes into the movie by a dude in drag, and then we follow Nancy Allen for the rest of the movie...?
This movie was so very demented and strange. It was kind of unlike anything I've seen. The nudity and sexuality are over the top, the acting is bizarre and not all that good, and the themes are wacky as shit. Essentially, there is a trans person who is killing people, and the murdered woman's son Peter teams up with Nancy Allen. They have some strange surrogate mother/sexual relationship and that's weird, but everything with this is weird. There is also a lot of silence, especially in the beginning, and I really liked that. The whole museum encounter and the previous scene were all without dialogue, and shot in strange offbeat methods. It was really cool, and for sure unique.
When the plot gets kicking into gear and we're following Nancy Allen, it tends to drag a tiny bit and the impulsive strangeness disappears for a while, but in the end it comes back for a jampacked and also nonsensical ending. What the fuck was this movie? I am not sure, but I do know I loved it. I might see all of De Palma's films, based on this alone.
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