Review of Fatal Attraction (1987) by Marischa B — 22 Nov 2010
Although I found myself checking the elapsed time during this movie to get some idea of when it would end, the final scenes made me squirm with sympathetic fright for the characters.
Roger Ebert says the filmmakers ruined a perfectly good psychological thriller by attaching a "Friday the 13th" ending. The IMDb Trivia page says the movie originally had a different ending in which Glenn Close's character commits suicide and Michael Douglas' character is arrested for her murder. Ebert and most serious film lovers would likely have preferred that ending. But making profitable movies sometimes means making them unpalatable for highbrow students of film.
Nevertheless, the "flawed" film resonated with women. I have vague memories of female friends and acquaintances in the late '80s seeing "Fatal Attraction" as an example of what SHOULD happen to any man who cheats on his wife. The movie found a place in our culture for a while, and the title was a euphemism for similar happenings in real life.
One wonders how much this movie had to do with the near universal creation of "stalker laws" in the 1990s.
This review of Fatal Attraction (1987) was written by Marischa B on 22 Nov 2010.
Fatal Attraction has generally received positive reviews.
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