Basic Instinct ★★★½
SHARON Stone’s vagina is just as famous as her face.
Who can forget the signature scene of Paul Verhoeven’s erotic thriller Basic Instinct during which her character of millionaire socialite, author and murder suspect Catherine Tramell takes complete control of a police interrogation.
While her character’s cunning and guile is to the fore throughout this scene, it’s the moment when she re-crosses her legs that everyone remembers.
Released in 1992, Basic Instinct is one of those films that has become the subject of many internet ‘trumours’, the main one being that Stone didn’t realise until too late that the controversial Dutch director was keeping the full scene, including the flash of said vagina, in the final cut.
Rarely has an actor’s career been so linked to one performance, even though Stone’s best by far is in Scorsese’s Casino where she more than held her own opposite Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci.
As written by another Hollywood eccentric Joe Ezterhaus, her character in Basic Instinct is at times horribly clichéd, but her performance is constantly mesmerising.
In fact, she well and truly shades the male lead Michael Douglas whose investigating detective should be just as complex but ends up out of his depth.
Basic Instinct is a product of its time – specific to a few years of the ‘90s when this type of lurid thriller (Jade, Body of Evidence, Body Double and Sliver were others) struck a chord with distributors and audiences. Would you believe it even opened the Cannes Film Festival that year.
These days this type of film is more likely to go straight to streaming (see that, I use a hip, modern term rather than ‘straight-to-video) than than cinemas.
Douglas plays Nick Curran, a San Francisco-based detective who has gained a reputation for being trigger happy with the nickname of ‘shooter’ to go with it.
In one of the many logic-defying aspects of the film he is a) on active duty but still visiting a psychiatrist in order to get a clean bill of mental health to do we’re not sure what else and b) the psychiatrist is also his ex-girlfriend and everyone knows has a conflict of interest but doesn’t seem to care.
A former rock star and nightclub owner is found bound to his bed and stabbed to death with an ice-pick. Suspicion falls on his girlfriend, Tramell, who years previously wrote a book that featured a main character being killed in exactly the same way.
The evidence is circumstantial but Curran is convinced of her guilt. He becomes obsessed with the beautiful, intelligent and stylish bi-sexual Tramell who appears to be playing and winning an ever-deepening series of mind games.
While the sex and violence are the most recalled aspects of the film, there is a solid mystery with twists that continue to the end.
Verhoeven may not be a technically great director, but he knows how to entertain, as evidenced by his strong body of work including the five-year run covering Total Recall, Robocop and Basic Instinct and his most recent and once again controversial rape drama Elle.
Similarly Ezterhaus has written some pretty average material but also fine thriller Jagged Edge and solid union drama F.I.S.T early in his career.
Ezterhaus and Stone reunited for Basic Instinct 2 in 2006 but it’s a muddled and lacklustre compared to the original. Ezterhaus and Verhoeven reunited for Showgirls in 1995 which is in the ‘so bad it’s good’ camp.