I love how the opening scene of Basic Instinct is filmed. You're almost certain you know the identity of the killer, but by never showing the killer's face, you have just the right amount of doubt in your head. Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct is a game of Tomcat and Kitty between Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, and it forever changed the mainstream erotic thriller.

The interrogation scene. Who doesn't love it? Of course, there's the ultimate money shot, but Sharon Stone completely flips the script. She's the one being questioned, yet by the end of the scene, she's the one in total control. That's real fuckin' power.

Was the San Francisco setting done on purpose? The early '90s was a…

"She's evil! She's brilliant!" Doctor Beth Garner on Catherine Trammel - note the order.

In Vertigo, a man falls in love with the image of a woman and the woman dies as a direct result. In Basic Instinct, the image takes her revenge. This is a thriller about the seductive power of the thriller, how deep down we're all attracted to killers and psychos, and how fear, excitement, and arousal can all be substituted with one another at will (but whose?). Most Hollywood thrillers are built on a rote good-vs-evil paradigm, but here that prism is irreverently skewered at every opportunity, and we have a villain who might be innocent and a hero who is unquestionably guilty.

I remember Ebert's…

I admit freely that my prejudices affect my viewing. I'll embrace John Waters despite his obvious flaws, and I'll indulge Verhoeven as he revels in the warped sexual thriller genre here. I assume this is satirical because it's Verhoeven, and so I see satire here. Maybe he's just a monster, though; I don't know. Maybe the heightened reality he portrays here isn't a scathing look at the demonization of sexuality. Maybe he just thinks audiences would pay a lot of money to see this, so he made it.

Regardless, what I see is a mixture of melodramatically distorted noir and pornographic thriller crafted to draw in slobbering hordes in order to twist their minds. Sharon Stone plays a depraved bisexual,…

Rewatching this coincidentally was followed by seeing an interview with Paul Verhoeven on Dutch television. He was there to promote his book with a collection of columns he wrote in which he reviews and analyses a large amount of classic films that somehow influenced his work. He also spoke about his unreserved admiration of Hitchcock.

Hitchcock, and in particular Vertigo, is strongly linked to this film and hearing Verhoeven talk about it, it almost seems like an homage to the master. In the interview Verhoeven claimed that Hitchcock was as perverted as he is and I guess he's right, so it isn't that far fetched to claim that this is a modern Hitchcock, a film he could have made had…

Paul Verhoeven's sexual thrillers always come off to me like Cinemax Brian De Palma. I don't think Verhoeven is a bad director, but there's always a sexual component to his films that feels more exploitative to me than anything else. With Basic Instinct, Verhoeven puts sex as a weapon at the forefront of his film, and the result is...fine.

The best trick that Basic Instinct has in its arsenal is that it presents the clear culprit early on, then like Michael Douglas' detective, we start to question the possibility that she is in fact innocent. But in order to do this, Basic Instinct throws in all manner of silly twists and turns, an entire collection of former murders and college…