So whereas Blow Out was Brian De Palma’s remake of Blow-Up, this is his remake of… well, it’s not really a strict remake of anything, but if you could somehow remake Rear Window and Vertigo at the same time, this is basically what you’d get. Or at least, it’s what you’d get if you also did it in a sleazy De Palma register, which he does.

We start off with a down-on-his-luck guy who’s been given a house-sitting job at this really cool UFO-looking house on top of a hill. Which also has a peeping-tom telescope that he uses to watch this one lady strip and do a dance every night. Which means that he’s also watching when he sees a crime happen over at her place, which gets him mixed up in the middle of things.

And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that everything is not what it seems at first — what he’s mixed up in is more complicated and weirder than he first imagined, which is where the Vertigo part comes into play. He ends up following people all over town, to beaches and shopping malls and seedy porn shoots (where the movie briefly turns into a literal Frankie Goes to Hollywood music video).

The movie isn’t fully successful. The plot is nonsense, the characters are implausible, and the vibe really is genuinely sleazy. But it’s unabashedly itself, and it’s not afraid to go over the top, and that has to count for something.