Given it's guilty of spawning a glut of domestic psycho imitators, it's easy to forget how shocking Adrian Lyne's shocker was in the late '80s. Not only did we see the hero being unfaithful to his wife in the first reel, we then watched his life fall to pieces as his one night fling came back to haunt him. Again and again and again. Seen by some as a metaphor for AIDS, by others as a feminist-bashing tirade, Fatal Attraction reached out beyond the box-office to grab headlines by the throat. Still tight, still fraught, it's easy to see why it revitalised the once-tacky erotic thriller genre.
DVD Extras:
A trio of talking heads docs lets everyone have their say about proceedings, complementing Lyne's lugubrious commentary. But it's the alternate `Madame Butterfly' ending that makes the disc. A downbeat sequence in which Glenn Close's character tops herself and Michael Douglas gets the blame, it was ditched in favour of the familiar "Shoot The Bitch!" ending. Why? Not for marketing reasons says Lyne, but because it just seemed like far too much of an anticlimax. Watching it here, it's difficult to disagree.
