De Palma's double

IF you enjoy watching tosh, and who doesn't late on a Friday night, Body Double (Pearl, 12.40am) is tosh of the first order. The story, a voyeur-fest from start to finish, is borrowed from two Hitchcock movies (Vertigo and Rear Window), and dotted with sleaze, driller killers and an unusual role - her first big one - for the usually cherubic Melanie Griffith. She plays a porn actress who holds the key to the crime, her Botticellian blonde curls replaced by a bad wig and her Working Girl wardrobe preceded by attire of a more alternative nature.

Director Brian De Palma is not known for restraint. This is another one of his fetish films (Dressed To Kill, Obsession) but he pulls it off with some panache and efficiency. De Palma, as it were, lets all his hang-ups hang out.

Struggling actor Craig Wasson is fired from his latest role as a punk vampire because he suffers from claustrophobia and gets nervous lying around in a coffin all day.

While house-sitting for a friend he spends hours glued to a powerful telescope watching a thoughtful lady opposite provide regular entertainment for her neighbours in the form of a striptease. Same time, same place, seven days a week. Until a masked man turns up with a Black & Decker. Wasson sees it all and before he can say ''hasn't this plot been done before?'' is more involved than he would like to be.

In any other director's hands this might have turned into an exploitative and fashionably gruesome melodrama. In De Palma's hands there was never any doubt that it would.

IN the 80s the post-nuke genre spawned a rash of films that looked like they had been filmed on a Mid-Levels construction site. The best of them was Mad Max, which combined the standard cautionary ingredients to great effect: rampant motorcycle gangs,dusty, desolate, wastelands and a stricken population turning on itself in Lord Of The Flies fashion.