Excellent but underrated film

The acting in this movie is really good.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The plot of this film might best be described as "The Graduate" meets "Fatal Attraction". The central character is Dan Hiller, a young man working as a builder, who meets, and has a brief affair with, Victoria, an attractive older woman. When his feelings of guilt (he is married with a young son) lead him to break off the affair, Victoria will not take no for an answer and pursues him, attempting to break up his marriage and ruin his career.In "The Graduate", Mrs Robinson was supposed to be about twenty years older than Benjamin, although in reality Anne Bancroft was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman. In "Seduced and Betrayed" we have the opposite situation. Susan Lucci, who plays Victoria, is actually twenty-six years older than Baywatch beefcake David Charvet, who plays Dan, although I suspect that the difference in the ages of the characters is supposed to be rather less. Charvet was only twenty-three when he made this film, considerably younger not only than Lucci but also than Gabrielle Carteris who plays Dan's wife Cheryl, and wears designer stubble throughout, presumably a desperate attempt to make him look slightly less boyish. I doubt if the scriptwriters really intended to imply that Dan had fathered a child while still a schoolboy and that Cheryl was guilty of the statutory rape of a minor.This carelessness about casting is only one of the problems with the film. After the success of "Fatal Attraction", there was a vogue in the late eighties and nineties for thrillers of this type, in which stranger who comes into the life of the hero or heroine initially seems pleasant and affable but later proves to be a mentally unstable or dangerously malevolent villain. "Fatal Attraction" itself is a reasonably good example of the genre, but "Seduced and Betrayed", which copies the same basic plot, is much weaker. Glenn Close gave an excellent performance in the earlier film, but Lucci is not in the same class as an actress. She has a reputation as the Queen as the TV movie- as far as I am aware she has never made a cinematic feature- but her performance here does nothing to counter the frequently-held belief that the TV movie is the last refuge of actors insufficiently talented or charismatic to make it in Hollywood.She is reasonably convincing as the seductive older woman, looking surprisingly glamorous for a woman only just short of her fiftieth birthday, but when in the second half of the film the script requires her to turn nasty it is evidently asking for emotions beyond her range. The storyline obviously indicates that Victoria reacts to Dan's rejection of her with rage and vindictiveness, but Lucci's demeanour indicates nothing more serious than mild disappointment. Hell hath no fury like a woman slightly miffed with her ex-boyfriend.Another reason for the weakness of the film is that Victoria is too obviously a villain. In "Fatal Attraction" we may not sympathise with the behaviour of Close's character Alex, but we can at least sympathise with her plight as a woman approaching middle age and desperate for love. Similarly, we can sympathise with the feelings of Rebecca de Mornay's character in "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle", a woman who has suffered much and is desperate for revenge. This sympathy gives those films an added depth and resonance, but Victoria is so obviously selfish and manipulative, using her wealth, beauty and influence to snare Dan, that no such sympathy is possible here.Carteris is not particularly convincing as Cheryl, and although the youthful Charvet copes surprisingly well with his role, there was nothing here to persuade me that this film was anything more than a routine TV potboiler. 4/10

I enjoyed the movie because my son Zach was the little boy in the movie. It was the only movie he ever appeared in. (He was actually cast in another movie, but his scene was cut.) He just graduated high school and will begin college in the fall. It is really nice that people talk about his one movie. By the way, on the set Susan Lucci, Gabrielle Carteris and David Charvet were all really nice to Zach and he enjoyed the experience. The movie was filmed in Phoenix, Arizona. Susan's husband Helmut was frequently on the set. In one scene where Zach was in the hospital, he is supposed to be sick. He wasn't acting. On that day, he really was sick. The film is sort of unbelievable, but it was great escapism.

"Seduced and Betrayed" seems to be one in a long line of movies created to try and emulate the success of "Fatal Attraction" and, like some of the others in the same genre, it doesn't do a very good job.David Charvet and Mary Ellen Trainor (and she only plays a brief part!) manage to give this movie some credibility with the excellent quality of their acting and the depth and dimension that they give their characters. The rest of the acting, however, leaves much to be desired. Susan Lucci disappoints in her role as the other woman -she seems much too unconvincing when she's trying to be the seductress and much too melodramatic when she becomes the villain. The rest of the acting is average but not really distinguishable -although the actor who plays the little boy is cute and performs his role well.The other aspects of the movie are disappointing. The storyline is so predictable that I could foresee almost everything that was going to happen as it unfolded. The dialogue was clichéd, predictable and laborious and the whole movie failed to hold my attention. Definitely one of the worst in its genre

I wondered if anyone else that saw this movie noticed the framed picture in the standing closet when Charvet's character accidentally bumped into it when the electric was out. I'm about 95% sure that was Susan Lucci's real life husband, Helmut Huber, and in reading the crews names, I noticed he co-produced this movie. Anyone else notice it? Apparently the framed picture was "Charlotte's" husband in the movie.I like both Susan Lucci and David Charvet as actors. I can see how the affair could actually happen in those circumstances, especially since Susan's character did several things to catch David off guard. But some of the movie was just too unrealistic, like the scene where Lucci shows up to dismiss the babysitter. The unrealism is why I voted the movie a 6.