(Continued)

8. Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin), "Romeo Is Bleeding" (1993)

Her tangled web: Gary Oldman plays a cop so crooked that he can't even stand straight in the whacked-out, blood-soaked mess that is "Romeo Is Bleeding." Then Lena Olin enters, as ferocious a fatale as ever seduced a film. Peter Medak's film is modern noir on acid and laced with speed. It's an unbalanced mess with a plot so twisted it defies logic, let alone description, but Olin cackles with ferocious depravity through the bloodlust, whether she's straddling Oldman in a coital tease or garroting him in an assassination attempt that she executes like an elaborate prank. That's some sense of humor.

You know she's trouble when: She leaves the bloody corpses of three victims as a calling card before she even makes her entrance.

Luscious lines: "I don't want you to kill him -- I just want you to bury him. If he dies in the process, that's his problem."

7. Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer), "Out of the Past" (1947)

Her tangled web: In a genre full of characters scrambling and plotting to grab their slice of the American dream, "Out of the Past" is a hard-boiled tale of betrayal with an unusually haunting quality. This is mostly thanks to the sleepy-eyed performance of Robert Mitchum as the resigned victim and the blithely seductive Jane Greer as the alluring but hollow object of his obsession. Where so many lethal ladies have it all planned out, Greer's Kathie is simply a hard-hearted opportunist who resorts to extreme measures -- such as shooting her possessive lover (Kirk Douglas) -- to get her piece of the action.

You know she's trouble when: She robs her gangster lover, runs off to the Caribbean and immediately seduces the private eye that her husband sends to retrieve her and the loot.

Luscious line: "Don't you see you've only me to make deals with now?"

6. Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), "Basic Instinct" (1992)

Her tangled web: Open on a sweaty sex scene interrupted (or is merely punctuated?) by an ice pick to the chest. Is Stone's voraciously bisexual author the killer or merely a ravenous sex bomb turned on by a body count? Either way, it's a turn on for detective Michael Douglas and, apparently, for kinky director Paul Verhoeven and hysterical screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. It's all pretty preposterous, but Stone's cold, dispassionate intensity is chic and sexy and very fatale.

You know she's trouble when: She wears a skirt sans underwear to her interrogation and flaunts her bad-girl ways by smoking in a police station ("What are you going do? Charge me with smoking?").

Luscious lines: "I'd have to be pretty stupid to write a book about killing and then kill him the way I described in my book. I'd be announcing myself as the killer. I'm not stupid."

5. Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), "The Lady from Shanghai" (1947)

Her tangled web: Orson Welles transformed the auburn girl-next-door beauty Rita Hayworth into an exquisite platinum-blond goddess with all the bearing and warmth of a marble statue. The Byzantine plot gets hopelessly lost in Welles' visually ravishing maze, but Hayworth is incandescent as the ice queen finally shattered by her own duplicity in the dazzling hall of mirrors finale. Welles' bumbling innocent sailor ("Innocent? Stupid's more like it") staggers away from the funhouse of corruption less a hero than simply a survivor.

You know she's trouble when: You find out she's a seductive young sex bomb married to a controlling, crippled old lawyer who has her spied on every second of the day. You do the math.

Luscious line: "I'm not what you think I am."

Next: "The Maltese Falcon," "The Last Seduction" and more