Director John Dahl followed up the neo-noir Red Rock West with The Last Seduction in 1995. It was another tale of greed and deception, but this time told from the point of view of the femme fatale - a frighteningly intense Linda Fiorentino. It wowed the critics and was a cult hit with moviegoers. Unfortunately for Fiorentino, the role saw her typecast in a subsequent string of inferior flicks.

On The Make

The big news about this Special Edition package is the inclusion of approximately 25 minutes of deleted footage. You can view this on its own (book-ended with scenes from the theatrical cut) or as part of an extended version of the film on disc two. Be warned though, these scenes haven’t been restored. The picture is rough and grainy and it’s a jarring experience to watch the film with these pasted-in additions.

Most of the unearthed footage sees Bridget (Fiorentino) stamping her authority at the offices of an insurance company where she’s wangled herself a job. It’s wryly amusing stuff, but funniest of all is a sequence where she teases her patsy lover Mike (Peter Berg) by cuffing him to a bed...and leaving him there. Dahl provides commentary for these scenes and for an alternative ending that explains a little more about Mike’s back-story and where he ends up after Bridget is finished toying with him. Dahl explains that he left all this on the cutting room floor because it was simply "too much explanation".

Dahl’s commentary for the extended cut is thoroughly engaging and peppered with laughter. He admits that when he initially read the script, "It was hard to tell if it was meant to be funny or serious", but then he talks about trying to balance the tone between the darkness in Bridget and the funny side to her criminal antics. He obviously enjoys this tricky juxtaposition and how "shocking" it was that Bridget is so "unapologetically bad". He also talks about the day-to-day challenges of making a film on a budget of $2.5m ie. having to be very organised while at the same time trying to encourage a spirit of collaboration on the set.

Looking Back At Last

A new half-hour documentary on disc one hears from the key cast and crew, including screenwriter Steve Barancik. He tells how he and Dahl humoured the execs with the idea of making a "sexploitation" movie when in fact they’d always intended this to be an "art film". Dahl goes on to talk about the difficult business of casting the female lead - 30 women turned down the role - but Fiorentino jumped at it because, he says, "It gave her the opportunity to be 'the guy' in the movie." She only appears in archive footage to echo this sentiment and with an unnerving titter, says, "We all have a dark side...." Berg and Bill Pullman (Clay) chip in too, the latter talking a lot about Dahl’s methods on set and what he calls his "blue collar approach" to film noir.

Pullman and Dahl have a long history together that goes back to when Pullman taught Dahl as a drama student. An episode of the US mystery series Fallen Angels is another of their collaborations and is included in this extras package. Eight minutes of fly-on-the-wall behind-the-scenes footage (including the fiery confrontation between Clay and Bridget) and a commemorative booklet on the erotic thriller caps off the extras. Surely fans of The Last Seduction will find it hard to resist this well-rounded package.

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