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#163 - Fatal Attraction
Adrian Lyne, 1987
An executive has a one-night-stand with a woman while his family is out of town, but things get complicated when the woman becomes increasingly attached to him.
I know that criticising a film by negatively comparing it to an older film is kind of an easy way out, but it's way too distracting just how many similarities there were to Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me, which also plays upon the same premise of a man being stalked by a one-night-stand. At least this is a bit smoother than Eastwood's incredibly rough-looking debut. Though there is quite a difference between Eastwood's care-free bachelor in that film and Michael Douglas's stifled family man in this film, it's all too easy of think of Glenn Close's character as a cinematic descendant of Jessica Walter's. Obsessive and unreasonable love, self-harm as manipulation technique, eventually resorting to murdering other people in jealous rages...it's all very familiar. At least Close really commits to it, which is a point in the film's favour. Douglas, well, he's Douglas, while the supporting cast is generally too bland to really care about (though Anne Archer does get put through the wringer a bit as the result of playing Douglas's put-upon wife). In terms of filmmaking, there are a lot of dry-looking dialogue scenes countered by the occasional moments of tension that are shot through with shrieking synthesisers and frantic camerawork, to say nothing of some heavily telegraphed jump scares. It also doesn't help that the film's most infamous act of brutality has become common knowledge in this day and age, and even when it does happen, the way in which it's revealed is at once too cheesy to take seriously yet too disturbing to find funny (which...is a success, I think?) It definitely feels like it's been imitated to hell and back in the years since its release and the similarities to Play Misty for Me didn't help, but it's still far enough from a bad movie.
Adrian Lyne, 1987
An executive has a one-night-stand with a woman while his family is out of town, but things get complicated when the woman becomes increasingly attached to him.
I know that criticising a film by negatively comparing it to an older film is kind of an easy way out, but it's way too distracting just how many similarities there were to Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me, which also plays upon the same premise of a man being stalked by a one-night-stand. At least this is a bit smoother than Eastwood's incredibly rough-looking debut. Though there is quite a difference between Eastwood's care-free bachelor in that film and Michael Douglas's stifled family man in this film, it's all too easy of think of Glenn Close's character as a cinematic descendant of Jessica Walter's. Obsessive and unreasonable love, self-harm as manipulation technique, eventually resorting to murdering other people in jealous rages...it's all very familiar. At least Close really commits to it, which is a point in the film's favour. Douglas, well, he's Douglas, while the supporting cast is generally too bland to really care about (though Anne Archer does get put through the wringer a bit as the result of playing Douglas's put-upon wife). In terms of filmmaking, there are a lot of dry-looking dialogue scenes countered by the occasional moments of tension that are shot through with shrieking synthesisers and frantic camerawork, to say nothing of some heavily telegraphed jump scares. It also doesn't help that the film's most infamous act of brutality has become common knowledge in this day and age, and even when it does happen, the way in which it's revealed is at once too cheesy to take seriously yet too disturbing to find funny (which...is a success, I think?) It definitely feels like it's been imitated to hell and back in the years since its release and the similarities to Play Misty for Me didn't help, but it's still far enough from a bad movie.