When I was a child in the 90s, we had a glass-fronted cabinet stuffed with VHS tapes. Despite the abundance, only a few tapes interested me: Disney’s Fantasia, anything starring Jim Carrey, anything starring Robin Williams. And Fatal Instinct – the very lewd, very kitschy 1993 erotic-thriller-comedy that I was certainly too young to be watching. (Sorry, Dad!)
Fatal Instinct is a spoof in the vein of 1980’s Airplane! or 1988’s Naked Gun, starring Armand Assante as Ned Ravine, a cop-slash-lawyer who defends his clients after he has arrested them. Directed by Carl Reiner, the movie such a hoot largely because of the ingenious casting, starting with Assante.
Before he ever played Gotti in 1996’s Gotti or Odysseus in 1997’s The Odyssey, Assante wielded his goofy charisma to play Ned “I don’t look as dumb as I am” Ravine. You could watch the whole film on mute and still be clenching your sides just from watching him stare stupidly into the far distance with a cigarette stuck in his nostril.
Then there’s Sean Young as the overblown femme fatale Lola Cain. Young, most famous for playing replicant Rachael in Blade Runner (1982), has a long-held reputation for being “difficult”, which – much like Faye Dunaway – is at least partly code for a woman who refused to stay in line. Seeing Young gloriously misbehaving is deeply gratifying. Then there’s the inverse in Sherilyn Fenn as Ned’s love-struck secretary Laura – a satisfying subversion of her iconic role as femme fatale Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks.
I might as well have watched Fatal Instinct on mute as a kid. I didn’t understand much of the sexual innuendo, nor did I get any of its innumerable homages. The title is a hybrid of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct and it also parodies thrillers such as Body Heat, Cape Fear, Double Indemnity and Sleeping with the Enemy.
Even those films it doesn’t explicitly lampoon, it alludes to: “It’s just the postman,” Ned’s wife says when there’s a knock at the door. “He always rings twice.” Or another reference: secretary Laura referring to Ned as The Mambo King, a nod to Assante’s role in the similarly named 1992 musical.
Rewatching Fatal Instinct as an adult is akin to rewatching The Simpsons and finally getting the references. The similarities run even deeper, though: on the Simpsons episode Cape Feare, Sideshow Bob torments Bart, like Fatal Instinct villain Max Shady torments Ned, like Max Cady torments Sam Bowden in the actual Cape Fear. Shady even has a Bart Simpson tattoo on his shoulder (though the film was released just a few weeks after the Simpsons episode, nixing any speculation that it was a direct reference).
Incidentally, my parents didn’t let me watch The Simpsons until high school. It seems implausible that they allowed me to watch a film with lines about “Mr. Pokey” (as phallic as it sounds) and “[pulverising] my pee-pee”. Maybe they, like me, missed many of the racy jokes and were taken in by Assante’s bird-like features and Young’s captivating beauty (even as she insists, “I’m ugly. UGLY!”). Perhaps the throwbacks to classic films lured them in. Maybe they just thought it was, in Ned’s words, “stupid, idiotic, caca-doody poo-poo”.
Either way, I’m glad it flew under their radar. As a child, I would slip the tape into the VCR and immediately start to giggle. I’m still giggling thirtysomething years later – only now I get the gag.
Fatal Instinct is available to rent in Australia, and on Prime Video in the UK and US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
