The streaming service revolution has encouraged Hollywood studios to ransack their back catalogues for potential adaptations. Two late 80s affairs getting a fresh makeover are Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (★★★☆☆) and David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (★★★★☆). Viewed from the prism of #MeToo, both texts are cautionary tales of male malfeasance that feel very different when seen from a developed female point-of-view.

Many viewers will already know Lyne’s epic of elevator sex and boiled bunnies, with James Dearden’s screenplay having its ending filmed but then cut for release. As scripted, Michael Douglas’ unfaithful husband was arrested for the murder of his lover Alex, played by Glenn Close. This revived scene provides a jumping-off point as we fast-forward a few years to see grizzled ex-DA Dan Gallagher (Joshua Jackson) getting parole after serving time for her killing. There’s fresh emphasis on relationships with his wife Beth (Amanda Peet) and daughter Ellen (Alyssa Jirrels) while flashbacks revise the original film’s events. 

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Dan started out with aspirations to be a judge, but his dalliance with ‘victim services’ personnel Alex Forrest (Lizzy Caplan) complicates his world.  Alex is still a tease (‘have you ever pushed that red button?’ she goads Dan in a lift encounter), but she’s also an elemental figure who is clearly being wronged (Dan callously threatens to get Alex fired when she fakes an attention-seeking overdose). Denying their attraction is like ‘fighting blood itself’ insists Alex, but blood is soon to be spilled and that rabbit has reason to look nervous . . .

While Fatal Attraction doubles down on accusations of abusive male behaviour, as well as stoking current anxieties about US judicial corruption, Dead Ringers aims for something darker and more esoteric in traditional Cronenberg style. In the original, Jeremy Irons played Elliot and Beverly Mantle, twin gynaecologists who duplicitously substitute for each other in their relationships with women. 

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This Amazon reboot rings some changes by casting Rachel Weisz in both parts, with Britne Oldford as the patient who provides a catalyst for the twins’ painful uncoupling: ‘do you want me to get her for you, Ellie?’ says Beverley as they size up another potential conquest. The Mantle twins are trying to revolutionise childbirth via their swanky Manhattan birthing centre and some sci-fi notions of ‘female sperm’. This Dead Ringers goes to some effort in showing that girls can be players too, with these manipulative protagonists bored by a lack of ‘imaginative capabilities’ in the men around them.

While both projects are weakened by slavish inclusion of iconic scenes for die-hard fans, they ultimately make rather different points. The more mainstream Fatal Attraction puts the patriarchy firmly in the dock while the intense Dead Ringers revels in female wrongdoing, garnished by bouts of menstrual discharge. If nothing else, both series provide striking femme-fatale roles for their leads, with Caplan making Alex far more than a jump-scare monster, and Weisz delivering not one but two subtly different but equally formidable performances.

Dead Ringers is available now on Prime Video; Fatal Attraction starts on Paramount+ on Monday 1 May.