Yarjka’s review published on Letterboxd:
“You ruined my surprise ending!”
What a glorious (bizarre) homage to Hitchcock (particularly Rear Window and Vertigo, but there are snippets of other Hitchcock films scattered throughout as well)! Brian De Palma mixes the classic thriller/noir genre into an X-rated amalgam of ‘80s excess filled with metatextuality, parody, and symbolic layering. Everything is presented and commented on superficially, so there’s not exactly a lot of depth to probe, but therein lies the fun: this film puts it all out there for you. It’s wacky, it’s wild, and it’s incredibly self aware.
Call me naive, but I never realized how overtly sexual Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” is until hearing it in this sequence. And wow, what a sequence!
I was trying to place the lead actor (Craig Wasson) all during the film. Does he just look like Bill Maher? I wondered. No… it turns out I was remembering him as James Madison from A More Perfect Union, a nearly two-hour dramatization of the drafting of the United States Constitution that I watched multiple times in multiple school classes growing up in Utah.
