Fatal Instinct (1993) MGM/Comedy RT: 91 minutes Rated PG-13 (off-color humor) Director: Carl Reiner Screenplay: David O’Malley Music: Richard Gibbs Cinematography: Gabriel Beristain Release date: October 29, 1993 (US) Cast: Armand Asante, Sherilyn Fenn, Kate Nelligan, Sean Young, Christopher McDonald, James Remar, Tony Randall, Clarence Clemons, Michael Cumpsty, John Witherspoon, Blake Clark, Bob Uecker, Eartha Kitt, Bill Cobbs. Box Office: $7.8M (US)
Rating: * ½
“Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
The above (mis)quote is attributed to actor Edmund Gwenn who uttered something close to it on his deathbed. He wasn’t wrong. Comedy is extremely hard, especially spoofs. Unless you’re part of Team ZAZ, the madcap geniuses behind Airplane, Top Secret and The Naked Gun, doing a movie parody is tricky business. There’s no guarantee it’ll be any good. It’s a game of hit or miss. Some work and some don’t; there’s no telling why. Spoofs are either funny or they’re not. It’s just the way it is.
For every gem like Airplane or The Naked Gun, there are a few stinkers like Fatal Instinct, a spoof of erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct and film noirs like Double Indemnity and Body Heat. It could have worked. It should have worked, especially with Carl Reiner (Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid) behind the camera. It doesn’t. There’s nothing wrong with the mechanics; it has the right parts. They just don’t work as a whole machine. Fatal Instinct misses the mark more times than Robin Hood with a blinding hangover.
Many titles are spoofed throughout Fatal Instinct. I’ll name them as I go. The main character is Ned Ravine (Assante, The Mambo Kings), a hard-boiled cop who also works as a defense attorney. A lot of times, his clients are criminals he arrested himself. One night, he meets Lola Cain (Young, No Way Out), a femme fatale interested in employing his services [Body Heat]. They become sexually involved, but Ned is already married to Lana (Nelligan, Eye of the Needle), a seductive adulteress having an affair with an addle-brained mechanic (McDonald, Happy Gilmore) with whom she’s plotting to kill her husband for the insurance money [Double Indemnity]. When Ned calls it quits with Lola, she shifts into crazed stalker mode [Fatal Attraction].
Meanwhile, psycho killer Max Shady (Remar, 48 Hrs.), recently released from prison after a seven-year stretch, is also stalking Ned with the intention of killing him for failing to successfully defend him in court [Cape Fear]. The other woman in Ned’s life is his Girl Friday, secretary Laura (Fenn, Twin Peaks), who’s been hiding from her abusive husband (Cumpsty, The Ice Storm) after escaping him by faking her own death a few years earlier [Sleeping with the Enemy].
Other titles parodied in Fatal Instinct include Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Chinatown, 9 ½ Weeks, JFK, Narrow Margin, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Diabolique, Niagara and The Dark Mirror (how’s that for an obscurity?). It even manages to work in a reference to Home Alone. By all means, Fatal Instinct should be a laugh riot. At the very least, it should amuse. It does neither. It barely manages a chuckle or two. It’s more interesting than it is funny. It’s interesting to pick out the movies being spoofed and to see how writer David O’Malley (The Boogens) ties the plot threads together. If any of it had actually been funny, we would have really had something. It’s hard to believe the late, great Carl Reiner directed it. We’re talking about the same guy that co-wrote The 2000 Year Old Man with Mel Brooks. He was never as off-the-mark as he is here, not even in mediocre efforts like Summer Rental and Sibling Rivalry.
I’ll say this much for Fatal Instinct; it has a game cast. They do a decent job portraying the character types they’re spoofing. Honestly, I don’t really have anything bad to say about this aspect of the movie except that Assante plays it too straight to be funny. Spoofs require actors that know how to play it straight to the point of silliness. Leslie Nielsen was good at that. He would have known what to do with the role of thick-headed hero; look what did with cop Frank Drebin in the TV series Police Squad and the Naked Gun movies. Young, on the other hand, crushes it as the psycho femme fatale, a role she reportedly played in real life too if James Woods is to be believed.
The weird thing is I remember liking Fatal Instinct when I saw it at the movies in fall ’93. I was looking forward to rewatching it as I needed a good laugh or several. It didn’t happen this time. I’m really at a loss to explain why Fatal Instinct fails at its one job. I can only repeat that it doesn’t work. It’s simply not funny. It makes dying look all that much easier.
