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Guilty pleasures - or in the book world they are often referred to as beach books or popcorn or even junk food - you enjoy eating them or watching them or reading them but they have no nutritional content to them. The late '80s and early '90s were full of serviceable guilty pleasures, usually in the guise of thrillers. The genre hit its critical peak with the overrated Michael Douglas flick Fatal Attraction in '87 (that movie actually got a best picture Oscar nomination and that was back when they had a mere five elite films nominated). Superstar bum-flasher Douglas continued his reign as victim to the ladies lust, hitting his apex in '92 with the sleazy homophobia of Basic Instinct. Of course director Paul Verhoeven had done the same story much more effectively with his Dutch film, The 4th Man, ten years earlier.

Video cassettes and cable helped make the suspense genre a staple of movie watchers' subconscious. You may or may not remember the titles, but the films were popular in some form or another, ingested like a bag of potato chips, enjoyed that evening and forgotten the next day. Blink, Color Of Night, Dream Lover, The Last Seduction, Jennifer Eight, The Final Analysis, Jagged Edge, Suspect, Pacific Heights, blah blah blah, the list of title goes on. But for some reason there is one that I always remember. I guess I enjoyed it more than the others...Malice.

Director Harold Becker capped a solid decade of thrillers with Malice. He started his career with the great adaption of the Joseph Wambaugh book, The Onion Field, in '79 and then did a number of decent second tier movies like Taps, Sea Of Love, and another forgotten Wambaugh adaption, The Black Marble. After Malice he would sink downhill, knocking out clunkers like the dreadful Domestic Disturbance (remember that stinker with John Travolta and Vince Vaughn? Yikes!).

But with Malice it all went right, for the most part. It's almost a classic Noir set-up. Bill Pullman and Nicole Kidman play a seemingly happy all-American couple. She is anxious to start filling up their cool old house with little tykes. Soon his high school acquaintance (Alec Baldwin), now a super-stud, party-boy doctor moves in to their spare floor. When the wife has medical complications and is operated on by the drunken doctor, he screws up and damages her reproductive organs, making having babies impossible for her. She leaves her husband. He searches for her and starts to learn maybe she was not as clean-cut as he thought. The mystery begins...

The film has some great twists. It got me good. Maybe I’m blind but I did not see some of the crazy twists coming. And as outrageous as those twists may have seemed, on a second inspection they all make sense and add up. The film is also aided by a pro cast. In supporting roles, Anne Bancroft hams it up nicely as an old drunk. Peter Gallagher does his yuppy thing well. Bebe Neuwirth attempts some sort of Massachusetts, by way of Eugene O’Neill, accent. And rather sickly looking, the great George C. Scott shows up for a scene to lend some dignity and class to the film.

Bill Pullman is perfect as the victimized everyman. You know he was hot stuff for a few years there, playing the President in the mega hit Independence Day, and he even had the lead in auteur director David Lynch's Lost Highway. But after doing the offbeat cult comedy Zero Effect it's been less exciting scripts for the actor (Scary Movie 4!). I suppose every decade has a Pullman, remember Ryan O'Neal? He was huge in the early seventies. What's he been up to lately?

In 1993, Nicole Kidman was mostly known as the tall redhead married to the shrimpy Tom Cruise. It would be a few more years before she would win over audiences with her amazingly creepy performance in To Die For and then become a highly respected actress, even winning an Oscar for her nose in The Hours.

Alec Baldwin is perfect as the arrogant doctor. You may recall, back in those early Clinton years he was another hunky "next big thing" actor. Only instead of that breakout role that would take him to the next level, he waded in big-budget clunkers like The Shadow for most of the decade. Luckily, later with putting on a little weight and audiences discovering his sense of humor, he was able to reinvent himself as a character actor and do a good job making fun of his own blustery persona. Now he is one of the top comic actors on television. He has ended up having an interesting career.

Malice could have been made in the 1940s with Kirk Douglas and Ava Gardner in the Baldwin and Kidman roles. The films of the Noir period were chock-full of sneaky women who couldn't be trusted - some plot devices never change. Of course Noir films were updated better in earlier films like Chinatown and Body Heat with NOIR stamped across their foreheads. Malice is a little more subtle with its influences, but equally as fun with its punch, if not as artfully crafted. It's a perfect guilty pleasure, enjoy it while it lasts, and probably forget about it in the morning.