Word: fatale
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What do you get when you blend the female psycho-killers of "Fatal Attraction" and "Basic Instinct" with unabashed, potentially idiotic slapstick? Carl Reiner's "Fatal Instinct," that's what. True to its synthetic title, the movie satirizes various psycho-thrillers of recent years, including "Cape Fear," "Body Heat," and "Sleeping with the Enemy...
...silly or obnoxious mood, "Fatal Instinct" offers generous portions of belly-laugh humor and counterintuitive surprises. In a movie devoted to poking fun at how seriously American thrillers take themselves, there is hardly the space or the generic license to develop interesting characters or an original plot. The main characters are all larger-than-Hollywood caricatures, designed to mock rather than to intrigue...
...moment of artificial suspense, a door creaks as it is opened, only to continue creaking after it has stopped moving. Or, the tense music that accompanies impending doom abruptly stops when the running bath water is turned off (from the "Fatal Attraction" bathtub scene). But then, five seconds later, the faucet is turned back on and the tense music brings back the conditioned suspense...
Outside of its parody of Hollywood suspense films, "Fatal Instinct" even attempts to ridicule, among other things, the law and our lawsuit-happy society. When Ned discovers that his wife tried to kill someone trying to kill him, Ned the detective arrests her, and then Ned the lawyer defends her. Reiner then takes "Court TV'"s commercialization of justice to its absurd, perhaps plausible limit: law as a spectator-sport, with commentators, whistle-blowers and half-times...
...Fatal Instinct" delivers the laughs that one would expect from any unbridled and irreverent parody of Hollywood thrillers. What it lacks in originality or substance, it compensates for in surprise and entertainment...