Too Easy

This awkwardly told sexual thriller about a predatory young woman obsessed with a married man isn't much more than a gussied-up knockoff of the hit film Fatal Attraction . Robert Saunders is an ambitious newspaper editor married to the lovely Anne, an attorney. At the office he meets Kathy Becker, a trashy, diminutive, highly sexed brunette, and immediately falls under her spell. Likewise, Kathy decides that Robert is just the man for her and sets about getting him. But in an intimation of violent trouble to come, soon after Robert proposes to Kathy, her former husband, an ex-con, tries to muscle his way back into her life. After deftly knocking him out with a skillet, Kathy hatches a similar, if more lethal, plan for getting rid of Anne, setting the stage for a bloody showdown at Robert's suburban home. Told for no apparent reason from several points of view and in the present tense, and burdened by flimsy characterizations, leaden dialogue and an unconvincing conclusion, Price's cockeyed cautionary tale features only a few psychologically compelling moments--not nearly enough to put up with his shabby rendering of a deadly triangle that's been traced far better elsewhere. (July)