TV REVIEW : Taking a Bloody Trip Up the Corporate Ladder

If there’s anything we’ve learned from the last couple years of thrillers, it’s to trust no one--not nannies, policemen, tenants, roommates, lovers, spouses, no one. One of the few types of significant other heretofore not covered by this paranoid genre--the secretary--gets its shot tonight in the TV movie “Body Language” (at 9 on the USA Network).

If you’re one of those who thought that “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” somehow represented a subconscious reaction against female empowerment, wait until you get a load of “Body Language,” which posits that career women really are killers. Linda Purl plays the psycho executive assistant who frustratedly lusts after everything that boss Heather Locklear represents, plotting to steal her manner, her man and ultimately her job. And to get to the top rung, she’s not afraid to cut a bloody swath through the typing pool, as it were.

The script makes a lame stab at spoofing sexism in the workplace, via a company president (Eddie Albert Jr.) who’s--surprise!--an overt sexual harasser. “Women tend to crack under pressure,” he informs Purl, explaining why gals never last in executive spots. (And you need to go back to Thriller 101 if you can’t foresee what’ll happen to his head a few seconds later.)

Unfortunately, the picture itself seems to carry the same implicit message, offering no background behind Purl’s homicidal battiness other than pure, hormonally imbalanced ambition.

To the extent that this hokum works--which is a very, very, very tiny extent--it’s because of successful casting against type: Locklear, as the executive, seems much more the secretarial type, whereas Purl, her underling and cunning adversary, really does look and act like someone who’d be comfortable in the company of CEOs. And Albert brings a convincing smarminess even to a horribly written role.

“Body Language” (which seems presciently similar in some ways to the upcoming “Single White Female” movie) has at least some of the campiness you’d expect, climaxing in the office with the two identically dressed leads cat-fighting to the death in a scene that looks eerily like an upscale version of female mud wrestling. May the best Kelly Girl win.