Word: hitchcockian
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...critics -- and not a single teenager among its cast of characters -- luck into the national bloodstream? By tapping the current mood of sexual malaise with a cautionary -- indeed, reactionary -- tale about an errant husband, a faithful wife and a career woman unlucky in love. And by skewing a Hitchcockian domestic thriller into a rousing horror show. Fatal Attraction starts as Vertigo and ends as Psycho. For all its flaws, the picture deftly scares and excites people with fun-house-mirror reflections of themselves. As Director John Carpenter (Halloween) notes, "The strongest human emotion is fear. It's the essence...
Last spring Paramount sneaked Fatal Attraction to preview audiences. Their response was positive except for the ending. In that version, Alex committed suicide to the strains of Madame Butterfly and left Dan's fingerprints on the knife, thus framing him as her murderer. Ironic, Hitchcockian, certainly fatalistic and pretty darned Japanese -- but not satisfying. Says Lyne: "It was like having two hours of foreplay and no orgasm...
...murder. All three trade in multiple female identities and tease the viewer into hoping the heroine will take one more step in the dark. Now for the differences. Winter is a dud in a handsome shell. Window has a cunning plot but not much craft. Widow rides smoothly on Hitchcockian tracks until it finds its own detours of style and psychology...
...independently, they invent the notion of stealing the turtles and setting them free in the ocean. It requires only the intercession of a third party, the creatures' keeper, to bring them together. Thereafter, Turtle Diary casts its spell mainly through its refusals. The heist proceeds without hitch or Hitchcockian suspense. There is not a single sentimental or anthropomorphic word, nor does anyone utter a sound about endangered species or ecological morality. William and Neaera do not fall in love as a result of their shared adventure. Each remobilizes sexually in surprising ways...
...themes of flight and pursuit, of innocence shading into culpability, are Hitchcockian. But John Landis' film is not a genre genuflection; it is a thoroughly modern, satanically entertaining night flight into the Zeitgeist city of the 1980s. This Los Angeles is a kingdom of chic sleaze, where every black soul gleams like Bakelite. In the Rodeo Drive boutiques, Iranian thugs and their bimbos are served champagne and caviar. Diana's brother (Bruce McGill) dresses himself and his apartment in Elvis memorabilia and drives a white Caddy bearing the legend THE KING LIVES. A shabby-genteel Brit (David Bowie) eases...