The two have sex, with her seated on the kitchen sink, and when she reaches for the faucet and splashes her hot face Lyne shoots it as if the water were wildly erotic. The director, Adrian (“Flashdance”) Lyne, puts on bravura demonstrations of frenetic passion. De Mille picture, she comes from hell: her loft is in the wholesale-meat district, where fires burn in the street.

She makes spending the night together seem casual and grown up-makes him feel he’d be a total wimp to say no-and he goes with her to her loft. She makes all the overtures he’s not particularly eager, but she semi-transforms her frighteningness to sexiness, and he, being frightened, finds it sexy. We see all the warning signals that the lawyer doesn’t, and when he runs into her again, on a weekend when his wife and six-year-old daughter are out of town, we sense the hysteria behind her insinuating repartee and the hot looks she fastens on him. She’s made up to get attention, yet she resents it: the lawyer’s plump pal (Stuart Pankin) tries a pleasantry on her, and she gives him a drop-dead stare. She’s wearing a Medusa hairdo-a mess of blond tendrils is brushed high off her forehead and floats around her face. At a New York publishing party, a dull but presentable corporate lawyer (Michael Douglas), a settled married man, exchanges glances with a bold-eyed, flirtatious woman (Glenn Close), a book editor. “Fatal Attraction” is just about the worst dating movie imaginable-a movie almost guaranteed to start sour, unresolvable arguments-but long lines of people curl around the block waiting to see it.

The guy who mistook his wife for a hat