The special edition DVD of Fatal Attraction has been released, a version that includes the alternate ending of the film (Glenn Close kills herself) and a mini-doc with central figures looking back on the significance of the film.

Having watched the film once more, this appears to be a case of a bad movie being in the right place at the right time. Really, did anyone ever consider this thing good? Utterly predictable, full of wooden acting and ringing with hollow family-values thematics, this is thoroughly banal and barely worth looking back on.

Except, of course, for its historical significance. The film preyed beautifully upon het fears that they were next in line in the AIDS crisis. Some argued Close played the HIV virus herself, taunting Michael Douglas at one point as a faggot and slicing herself open, offering him her oozing wrists in her suicidal bit.

Too bad about virtually every other aspect of the film. This is a cartoonish, crass mining of the epidemic. As for the DVD extras, the doc they’ve come up with doesn’t address any of the controversies surrounding the film (which might have made the DVD of actual interest) and instead wallows in self-congratulation. One would have thought Close could have come up with something brighter to say about her role in the film, one of the quintessential evil roles of the ’80s. :

—Matthew Hays