9 Terrible Movie Deaths That Ruined Great Villains

6. Alex Forrest - Fatal Attraction (1987)

One of the most successful movies of the eighties that wasn€™t a Star Wars or an Indiana Jones film, Fatal Attraction made $320 million worldwide (the equivalent of about $667 million in today€™s money) from a budget of $14 million. The film also entered the mainstream popular consciousness, starting a long conversation in western society on the subject of the consequences of infidelity that still goes on to this day. The term €˜bunny boiler€™ comes directly from one of the ways in which psychotic woman scorned Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) attempts to reconnect with/punish Dan, her married ex-lover. The original ending, however, is a far more potent climax to the drama than the one everyone eventually saw. Forrest was scripted to have killed herself, making it look as though Dan had killed her in order to frame him for murder €“ he would be saved by his wife, who locates a tape of Alex threatening suicide that exonerates him. It was a twisted, self-destructive plotline entirely in keeping with the passive aggressive mindset of the character, but it made studio bosses uncomfortable. They€™d skewed the psychological drama into a tense thriller, and they needed more oomph for the climax to their movie. In the reshot ending, Alex goes after Dan€™s wife Beth with a kitchen knife, and is almost drowned, and finally shot to death by Beth when she rears from the bathtub like Michael bloody Myers. The reductive, slasher-flick ending robbed the film of a good portion of the power that it had built up over time, and Close admits today that she agreed to do it under protest and considers it a mistake. It hands some of the power back to the betrayed wife, bringing her into the drama as a third participant€ which is fine if you believe that her character deserved to punish the woman for having the affair and not her husband, and a ropey change to make if you believe that the Fatal Attraction of the title should have remained the focus of the story. It€™s a wasted opportunity to make a genuinely good movie, that€™s for certain.