THE LAST SEDUCTION (Directed by John Dahl. Starring Linda Fiorentino, Peter Berg, Bill Pullman, J.T. Walsh)

The femme fatale is a masculine nightmare of deadly seduction who has barely made a transition from the classic film noirs of the forties. Sure there are plenty of lethal ladies in modern movies (from Glenn Close’s psychotic spurned lover in Fatal Attraction to Sharon Stone’s psychotic sex machine in Basic Instinct) but all that psychosis can be so unappealing. These killers are not women to die for, eliciting little audience sympathy. They are a breed of mad harridans, text-book exercises in male film-making misogyny, crucially lacking seductiveness.

Linda Fiorentino’s seduction technique is straight to the point. When small town stud Mike (Peter Berg) boasts that he’s hung like a horse, she insists on checking for herself by rummaging around in his trousers, while grilling him on his sexual history: how many lovers? Any prostitutes? Homosexual experiences? Once satisfied that she is unlikely to catch anything off him, she allows him to become her “designated fuck.” The sad eyed Berg winds up following her around pleading for a relationship, while Fiorentino uses his body and fucks with his mind.

Her character steams through the film with a casual nastiness that might make her seem the ultimate misogynistic creation, except she’s also the smartest, sassiest, funniest and toughest person in the film, breathing life into every scene. Her lawyer (J.T. Walsh) describes her as a “bitch on wheels” but she’s much more than that: she’s a modern man’s nightmare: a career woman, a beauty in a business suit, who might not only take your job but will have your balls and your life if it suits her. She is the ultimate emasculator - the kind of villainess destined to become a feminist heroine.

Director John Dahl’s previous forays into film noir (the flawed Kill Me Again and amusing Red Rock West) were parodic affairs that concentrated (as the genre traditionally has) on the hang-dog heroes of which love makes a victim. Here he employs a more dead-pan style that steers well clear of parody or pastiche, and focuses squarely on the amoral schemes of the woman running rings around men’s hearts, minds and (this being the ’90s) other organs.

The plot (as in all these things) defies credibility, but is clever enough to keep you guessing, which is about all we can ask from such a familiar genre these days. And, with dialogue of the highest calibre and performers to make the most of it, The Last Seduction is so entertaining chances are you will willingly suspend belief and surrender to its deadly charms. Femmes don’t come more alluringly fatal, and film noir doesn’t get much blacker than this.