Dan Gallagher has everything in life - a successful career, a beautiful wife and child, and a nice house. He manages to jeopardise everything in a weekend of sexual abandon with Alex Forrest - a woman he meets through work. They have a torrid fling but that's it for Dan, he wants to return to normality. Alex, on the other hand, has a serious yen for Dan and refuses to let go - cutting her wrists so he has to stay with her. Alex's behaviour becomes more unhinged throughout the film despite Dan's attempts to repel her. She claims to be pregnant, pours acid over his car, follows him home to his family where blissful domestic scenes literally make her sick. And then there is the kid's bunny boiling in a pot. You would have to be bonkers to come up with and execute a thing like this and Alex kidnaps the little girl and takes her on a roller-coaster. Dan is irate and goes to Alex's flat and physically assaults her. He stops short of strangling her to death. Dan's wife Beth was involved in a car accident whilst looking for Ellen the daughter. She forgives Dan and comes home. They think that Alex is being hunted for by the police but whilst Beth is having a bath, a familiar figure appears and there is quite a tussle going on between Beth, Dan and Alex - whose sanity has completely deserted her. Who will prevail? The jilted psycho or the loving, forgiving wife? This is of course the film from which the term 'Bunny Boiler' derived and it certainly sets a grim portrait of a female erotomanic - a recognised psychiatric disorder in which someone (in this case Alex) falls desperately in love with someone else (Dan) and refuses to believe that that person doesn't love them back despite all evidence to the contrary. Alex is also a very clear portrait of a woman suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder - we can see this in her self mutilating and terrible fear of abandonment. Albeit, it is a very unflattering portrait of the illness whose sufferers mainly confine their destructiveness to themselves. Glenn Close consulted very carefully with psychiatrists to prepare for the role of Alex. Is her character demonised in the film? After all, it takes two to tango, and Dan was a willing participant in the tango. Is he getting his just desserts for being unfaithful? Does he deserve this scorned woman looking for her pound of flesh? Fatal Attraction is, in this sense, is a bit of a morality play and also a cautionary tale of what happens when you don't keep it in your pants.
My first film watched was Carrie aged 2 on my dad's knee. Educated at The University of St Andrews and Trinity College Dublin. Fan of Arthouse, Exploitation, Horror, Euro Trash, Giallo, New French Extremism. Weaned at the bosom of a Russ Meyer starlet. The bleaker, artier or sleazier the better!
