Fatally Funny

directed by Carl Reiner

produced by Pieter Jan Brugge

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

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."

If you're in a 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.

Armand Assante, who starred in "Mambo Kings," plays the role of Ned Ravine, the dull-witted lawyer-detective and object of his adulterous wife Lana's (Kate Nelligan) murderous schemes. Sherilyn Fenn stars as Laura, Ned's devoted secretary who is blindly in love with him. She competes with the provocative, Sharon Stone-like seductress, Lola (played by the sizzling Sean Young), for his attention.

But the story is secondary to slap-stick and surprise. Actually, anything goes in this movie. At one point, Ned crosses the street without paying attention and gets run over by a bus. The next scene shows him in his law office, looking exactly as he ought to look after having been steamrolled by a large vehicle.

In another scene, Lana conspires in a public park with her lover (and car mechanic) to kill Ned in the one absurdly unlikely way that would triple her life insurance collection. To prevent other park visitors from overhearing their plot, they start speaking in Yiddish (with subtitles for the audience). After a few sentences are exchanged, the man sitting next to them on the bench indicates that he has been following the whole conversation by reading the subtitles.

One of Reiner's favorite comic techniques is to manipulate music and sound to confound the auditory expectations audiences have been virtually conditioned to experience in suspense movies.

In a 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.

But at times the movie's antics and silliness get repetitive and infantile, as when, in the same courtroom scene, Ned continually hurls new evidence at the bailiff as if it were a football. The movie also disappointingly borrows certain "Naked Gun" gimmicks, like having Ned's hair freeze in the direction the wind blew it during a car ride.

"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.