Flesh + Blood (1985)

Flesh + Blood, released in 1985, was Paul Verhoeven’s first American movie. Or at least it was his first movie made with American money for an American studio (although there was a small amount of Dutch and Spanish financing as well). It was in fact shot in Europe, mostly in Spain.

The setting is western Europe in 1501. Movies that took a grim unglamorous view of the Middle Ages were very fashionable at the time (John Boorman’s Excalibur came out a few years earlier) but Flesh + Blood must be just about the grimmest depiction of the period ever put on film.

The Duke of Arnolfini has hired a band of mercenaries to recapture his city for him. Having promised them unlimited loot he then betrays them, driving them off with nothing to show for their efforts on his behalf. He persuades the leader of the mercenaries, Hawkwood (Jack Thompson), to do the dirty work of betrayal for him.

In the course of sacking the city Hawkwood butchers a nun. It is entirely accidental. This becomes the pivotal event of his life. He now intends to buy a farm in the country and devote himself to nursing the nun back to health. He wants no more of killing. His motivation is not entirely clear. It may be that he thinks that by slashing a nun with a sword he has committed a grievous sin. Maybe he was getting disillusioned with war anyway. Maybe there was something about the nun that fascinated him (she’s a young pretty nun).

One of Hawkwood’s lieutenants, Martin (Rutger Hauer), becomes a kind of unofficial leader of the penniless mercenaries. He would like revenge. He is perhaps even more motivated by a desire for money and power. He was cynical enough to begin with but now he realises more strongly than ever that without money and power a man is nothing.

The accidental finding of a statue of St Martin changes everything. The mercenaries’ spiritual leader is the Cardinal (Ronald Lacey). In fact he’s just a crazy priest. He sees the statue as a sign from God. St Martin is of course Martin’s patron saint. This must mean that Martin is destined for greatness, and the statue will lead him to that greatness. Martin is now undisputed leader of the band.

Arnolfini has arranged a marriage for his son Steven (Tom Burlinson). Steven fancies himself as a scholar, a man of science. He’d like to be the next Leonardo da Vinci, inventing cool machines and gadgets.

His intended bride is Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Steven is not keen on the idea of marriage. Agnes has a certain natural adeptness at the art of seduction and she manages to get him interested in her. She also convinces him that their destinies are linked.

Disaster strikes. Agnes is captured by the mercenaries and raped by Martin. It’s a controversial scene but it’s the pivotal moment of the movie. Martin now feels that his destiny is tied up with Agnes. She is now his woman, but she is more than that. She is an obsession.

There are plenty of adventures and disasters in store for all these characters whose fates become hopelessly intertwined.

Verhoeven is intensely interested in religion (although he is hardly a fan of the Catholic Church) and there’s plenty of focus on religious motivations, usually entangled with desire for money, power and sex.

This is not at all a Hollywood movie. Most of the characters do not have straightforward character arcs. They are contradictory multi-faceted characters capable of both good and evil, selfishness and sacrifice. The contradictions in their characters do not necessarily get neatly resolved. The movie suspends moral judgments on the main characters. Viewers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about these people.

This applies in a limited sense to Steven. It applies much more fully to Hawkwood.

Martin and Agnes are the most contradictory and multi-faceted of all. They are not people who have definite goals in mind. They react to situations in which they find themselves in whatever ways seem most advantageous to them at the time. Whether they have any genuine feelings for one another is uncertain. They seem to be motivated not by love but simply by a belief that their destinies are linked in inescapable ways. They are also very definitely motivated by survival. In the circumstances in which they find themselves that’s not entirely unreasonable. Their behaviour seems inconsistent because they adapt to circumstances.

Rutger Hauer is very good. Jack Thompson (an Australian actor I’ve never liked) is surprisingly good, as is yet another Australian actor, Tom Burlinson. The acting honours however go to Jennifer Jason Leigh who gives a wonderfully enigmatic performance.

At times Flesh + Blood is uncomfortable viewing. It’s a movie that takes a very bleak view of human nature, with not a trace of romanticism or idealism. It’s a powerful movie and it is highly recommended.

Arrow’s Blu-Ray looks great and Paul Verhoeven provides another excellent audio commentary.

RoboCop (1987)

RoboCop was not technically Paul Verhoeven’s first U.S. film (and he’d been directing features for years in the Netherlands) but it was the movie that put him on the map in a big way.

This is a dystopian cyberpunk science fiction thriller but in tone it’s a million miles away from the most famous dystopian cyberpunk science fiction thriller of the 80s, Blade Runner. RoboCop, disturbingly but interestingly, adds a lot of comic touches to an otherwise rather dark tale.

Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is a Detroit cop who has just been assigned to the toughest precinct in a city in which violent crime is totally out of control. What he doesn’t know is that he has been set up to be killed. The Detroit Police Department is now controlled by a private corporation, Omni Consumer Products (OCP). The corporation is about to demolish the entire city and build a brand new high-tech city (to be called Delta City) on the site. To carry out their plan they need total control, including total control of law enforcement. The potential profits are enormous.

They intend to reduce the costs of policing to a bare minimum. Their initial idea was to build law enforcement robots but the prototype developed a very unfortunate glitch. Just a minor bug in the system - it blew away a OCP executive for no reason at all. It put about two hundred bullets into the guy.

An ambitious mid-level exec has a better idea - cyborg cops. To build a cyborg cop you first need a real cop who is as close to being dead as possible. They’ve selected some promising candidates, like Alex Murphy, and assigned them to duties where the possibility of being killed becomes practically a certainty. Much to OCP’s joy Alex Murphy is soon blown apart by criminals. Now there’s not much left that’s salvageable, but enough for their purposes. Alex Murphy will become the prototype RoboCop.

RoboCop’s brain is part human and part electronic. His personal memories have been erased but his policing expertise and experience is still there because those things are useful. His personality has been all but destroyed because it’s not useful to OCP. At least in theory Alex’s personality has been destroyed but whether that’s true in practice remains to be seen.

We, the audience, know who shot Murphy. It was a very nasty crime lord named Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). Boddicker and his goons tortured Murphy first, in a scene in which Verhoeven portrays Murphy as a kind of Christ figure (Verhoeven states this in the audio commentary so it’s not speculation on my part).

RoboCop is not supposed to have any memories but he does have some incoherent images in his mind of his catastrophic encounter with Clarence Boddicker. RoboCop is not supposed to have any personal feelings but he develops an obsession with these disjointed memories.

Murphy’s partner on that fatal night had been Officer Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen). She doesn’t know that RoboCop is Murphy but she suspects that maybe he could be.

When it comes to cleaning up crime RoboCop is a huge success.

There are power struggles within OCP, with ambitious executives happy to stab each other in the back to get to the top. RoboCop’s success or failure can mean the difference between success and failure for some very ruthless men. For Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer) there’s a great deal at stake - his entire career. It would be a disaster if RoboCop developed any glitches. Glitches like remembering what happened on that fateful night. RoboCop might then embark on a campaign of revenge.

This is an exciting adrenalin-rush action movie but there’s a lot more going on. There’s a lot of black humour. There’s satire here as well. Now it has to be said that Verhoeven’s approach to satire is subtle in the way being hit by a baseball bat is subtle. On the other hand it is undeniably effective. It works because, like any good satire, it’s accurate. It’s just an exaggeration of things that we feel to be true.

There’s also a surprising amount of emotion. Machines don’t feel emotions but men do and while OCP thinks of RoboCop as a machine that’s not quite the case. RoboCop doesn’t quite understand his emotions because his memories are so fragmentary but he does have emotions, as we discover in one extremely powerful and effective scene in what was once Murphy’s house.

This is a dystopian future with an unsettling degree of plausibility. In 1987 a society under the boot heel of advanced digital technology really was science fiction. Today it’s everyday reality.

It’s all done with old school special effects - things like matte paintings and miniatures and stop-motion animation. RoboCop isn’t a CGI effect - he’s actor Peter Weller in a very elaborate rubber suit. This gives the movie a feeling of solidity, of reality, that you just don’t get with modern CGI. We really do understand that RoboCop is still to some degree a man rather than a mere machine. The problem is that RoboCop doesn’t know to what extent he’s still human.

A very similar idea would be developed in a slightly different way a few years later in the superb Japanese sci-fi anime movie Ghost in the Shell (1995).

RoboCop is an intelligent science fiction action movie with some interesting emotional nuance. Highly recommended.

The edition I saw was the Director’s Cut Blu-Ray which looks great and is packed with extras.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Starship Troopers, dating from 1997, has been (like most of Paul Verhoeven’s movies) widely misunderstood. There’s so much action and violence and noise and so many special effects that a lot of viewers (and unfortunately some reviewers) end up not noticing the satire.

At some point in the future humanity becomes involved in a war to the death with an alien species. The aliens are bugs. Gigantic very mean bugs. The war consumes millions of lives, of both people and bugs.

A bunch of high school kids in Buenos Aires decide that they want to join the military. They do so, but it turns out to be less fun than they’d anticipated. Contrary to expectations, defeating the bugs turns out to be awesomely difficult. Finally it penetrates even the military mind that the bugs are intelligent. Maybe not intelligent in a human way, but definitely intelligent. The bugs can not only out-fight us, they seem to have a distressing ability to out-think us.

Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) joins the military because Carmen joins up and he’s hopelessly in love with Carmen and he thinks he’ll lose her if he doesn’t enlist. Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer) joins up because she’s hopelessly in love with Johnny and she wants to be near him. Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) joins up because he’s ambitious and super-intelligent and he knows he’s not going to end up in the infantry. He’ll have a nice safe job in military intelligence. Johnny is as dumb as a rock so he was always going to end up in the infantry.

They go to boot camp and their experiences there follow the pattern set in countless previous movies. Their drill sergeant is merciless but that’s because he has to weed out the losers.

Then the war starts and Johnny, Dizzy and Carmen are caught in the middle of it.

I hate getting into political discussions in connection with movies (I have no interest in political ideologies myself) but this is such a political movie, based on a very very political novel, that it’s unavoidable in this case.

What’s interesting is the way this future society is portrayed but first we have make a detour and consider the source material, Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel of the same name. It’s regarded as one of the classics of the genre. It’s widely regarded as a fascist novel although Heinlein’s politics were in fact somewhat complicated. The key political point in the novel is that you can only become a full citizen in Heinlein’s imagined future society by undertaking military service. And only citizens have political rights. Only citizens can vote. If you want to be able to vote you have to join the military. It sounds like a recipe for a fascist military dictatorship but Heinlein thought it was a swell idea.

And in the movie military service is also necessary if you want political rights. It’s a society entirely run by ex-military types. It seems to be some sort of global government known as the Federation. As you can imagine Paul Verhoeven is much more sceptical about this idea than Heinlein was. In the movie the totalitarian nature of society is pretty obvious, with the population being fed an endless stream of propaganda by the military government, most of this propaganda being of course of a very gung-ho militarist nature.

There’s also a suggestion (it’s just mentioned briefly but it is there) that the bugs may not see themselves as the aggressors, that they may be acting defensively in response to human invasions of their sector of the galaxy.

Verhoeven’s movie is also much less admiring of the military. The war is an endless series of bungles caused by arrogance and a persistent tendency to assume that humans must be superior to bugs so therefore the bugs must be destined to lose. As a result of human military incompetence millions of lives are thrown away in ill-considered attempt to conquer the bugs’ home planet.

We only see one general, and he’s not only a blithering idiot he’s also a coward, hiding in a cupboard in terror of the bugs.

There are other aspects of the movie that are more complex. It’s hard to say exactly how Verhoeven expects us to react to a military ethos in which the highest expression of duty is blowing out a comrade’s brains rather than let him fall into the hands of the bugs. Sure, maybe it’s kinder in a way but it does capture the dehumanising nature of war.

One thing that a lot of people don’t seem to have noticed is that the Federation uniforms are vaguely reminiscent of Second World War Nazi uniforms. In fact there’s a lot of Nazi iconography associated with the Federation.

I don’t know how much more obvious Verhoeven could have made it that he was making an anti-fascist film but lots of mainstream critics at the time missed the point entirely and attacked it as a fascist movie. Mainstream critics really are pretty useless when confronted with a movie that takes an unconventional or non-mainstream approach. It’s also odd that so many people missed the fact that the movie is showing us that a society run by ex-military types will inevitably be a militaristic society engaged in endless wars.

The acting is less than dazzling but I suspect that the performances were exactly what Verhoeven wanted. These are people so heavily indoctrinated ands media-saturated that they’re incapable of independent thought. They’re content to be obedient cogs in the machine. Their emotions are also extremely shallow. They think and feel simplistically. They’ve been dehumanised.

A weakness is that the level of violence eventually desensitises the viewer. But than I guess that was also deliberate on Verhoeven’s part

The studio promoted the movie as another big dumb action movie blockbuster which it clearly isn’t so it’s not surprising that Starship Troopers did mediocre business at the box office. Its cult reputation has grown steadily since then.

Starship Troopers is an outlier among big-budget Hollywood science fiction epics. It really has more in common with Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) than with the average Hollywood sci-fi movie.

Starship Troopers is intelligent provocative science fiction. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed three other Verhoeven movies from the 90s, movies which also seemed to perplex critics - Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995).

Total Recall (1990)

Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 science fiction film Total Recall is based on a short story (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) by Philip K. Dick with a screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon. And of course it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, a big box office draw at the time.

Philip K. Dick also wrote the novel on which Blade Runner was based. Dick’s science fiction was noted for its disturbing and disorienting blurring of the boundaries between reality and illusion.

Doug Quaid (Schwarzenegger) works on a building site. He’s been having very troubling dreams about Mars. He’s never been to Mars but he’s become obsessed with the idea of moving to the Martian colony. His wife Lori (Sharon Stone) is determined to talk him out of the idea.

Then he finds what seems like a good compromise. He sees a TV commercial for Rekall, a company that offers what are in effect virtual vacations. You go to their office and they implant incredibly realistic memories of a fun-filled exciting vacation which never really happened. But the memories are so real that (so they claim) it’s just as good as a real vacation. 

In fact it’s better. They offer the perfect vacation. A vacation with none of the irritations of real vacations (such as the spaceline losing your luggage). And during this perfect location you get to have a steamy sexy holiday romance with a gorgeous member of the opposite sex. And as they point out to Doug, she will be absolutely his perfect fantasy woman.

You can also choose to spend your vacation playing a fantasy role. Doug chooses the secret agent option. You get to kill the bad guys, bed a gorgeous lady spy and return a hero.

Doug can’t wait. But it all goes horribly wrong. There’s something about Doug that Rekall didn’t know about. Something about Doug’s actual memories.

This is the point at which the movie starts to get really interesting. Doug isn’t sure where his dreams end and reality begins. The audience isn’t sure either. There’s the possibility of dreams within dreams. Doug’s dreams might be more real than his reality. His memories might be real or they might be faked, or he might be dreaming that his memories have been faked. At various points in the movie these questions are answered for us, or are they? Is Doug being presented with reality or more faked reality? Doug can’t be sure and nor can we. Everything is open to question.

This is also the point at which the action kicks in and from now on the movie will be almost non-stop hyper-violent action. With plenty of humour as well.

So this is a very cerebral piece of high concept science fiction and it’s a big dumb action adventure movie. It’s not that it switches between these two poles. Both strands of the movie are interwoven. It’s an adrenaline-charged roller coaster ride that keeps challenging our perceptions.

Paul Verhoeven makes this strange mixture work.

At various points in the movie we get revelations which suddenly make things clearer, and then we discover that they haven’t actually made things clearer at call. The revelations have just raised new questions and new doubts. It’s not that the movie is working on two levels, dream and reality. It’s working on multiple levels of dream and reality. The dreams might be real. The reality might be fake. It’s possible to interpret the movie in several different ways, depending on the point at which you think the movie has cut through the final level of falsehood and reached truth and reality. And depending on whether you think it ever reaches that point at all. All the possible interpretations of the movie work. You choose your interpretation and then you watch the movie again and you’ll decide on a different interpretation.

I like Schwarzenegger a lot in this movie. He could be very charming and very likeable with an engaging ordinariness about him. Quaid is a nice guy but he’s a hyper-violent nice guy and he’s confused and he’s emotionally torn. He has a beautiful blonde loving wife and a beautiful brunette girlfriend and he loves them both but they’re in different realities, or different dreams. This was probably the most challenging and complex rôle Schwarzenegger had played up to this point and he carries it off surprisingly successfully.

The brunette is Melinda (Rachel Ticotin), who was Quaid’s girlfriend only he wasn’t Quaid then.

Ronny Cox as Cohaagen, the virtual dictator of Mars, is nicely chilling. Michael Ironside is great fun as his chief henchman, the obsessed Richter.

Sharon Stone has to switch back and forth between two personalities, or two personas, and she does a superb job. It was this performance that convinced Verhoeven that she could handle her rôle in Basic Instinct.

Digital effects were very much in their infancy at the time. There are a few here but most of the special effects are done the old-fashioned way. And they look great. The Martian colony looks terrific - kind of high-tech but run-down and squalid at the same time, and very sleazy. There’s some amazing puppeteering and makeup work and miniatures work. Much of the movie was shot in Mexico City where Verhoeven found some wonderful New Brutalist architecture for his location shooting.

Schwarzenegger and Verhoeven share an entertaining and informative audio commentary. I get the feeling that Schwarzenegger is very proud of this movie, and with good reason. Verhoeven makes it clear that there’s no definitive interpretation of the events of the movie.

Total Recall had a very interesting production history. The idea of filming Dick’s short story had been kicking around for years. Schwarzenegger had wanted to do the movie for years. Dino De Laurentiis ended up owning the rights and he was adamant that he didn’t want Schwarzenegger. At various times at least half a dozen directors were in line to make the movie. Production had actually started in Australia, with Bruce Beresford as director, when De Laurentiis’s production company went bankrupt. Schwarzenegger heard about it, got on the phone to the guys at Carolco and within hours a deal was made. It was now to be a Carolco production with Schwarzenegger as star. Schwarzenegger had no doubts at all as to who the director was going to be. He desperately wanted to work with Paul Verhoeven. Verhoeven was keen. Within another day or so Rachel Ticotin and Sharon Stone had been cast. The movie was now to be shot in Mexico.

You can enjoy Total Recall as an action extravaganza and as an arty philosophical science fiction movie and you do both at the same time. Very highly recommended.

Basic Instinct (1992)

Basic Instinct, Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 neo-noir neo-Hitchcockian erotic thriller scripted by Joe Eszterhas, aroused controversy even before filming began. Feminists and gay activists were outraged, and of course didn’t need to see the movie in order to decide that they violently disapproved of it. They weren’t the only ones to misunderstand the film’s intentions and having his films misunderstood was something that has characterised Verhoeven’s career. Three years later Verhoeven and Eszterhas would team up again for the equally misunderstood Showgirls.

Basic Instinct starts with a man and a woman having sex, sex that culminates in gruesome murder. The victim was an ex-rock star who had transformed himself into a pillar of the community, with a cozy (and presumably corrupt) relationship with the mayor.

The obvious place for the police to start the investigation is with the victim’s girlfriend Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone). When they interview her Detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) and his partner immediately realise that dealing with Catherine isn’t going to be easy. She doesn’t play by their rules.

The evidence against Catherine is practically non-existent but they call her in for further questioning anyway, which leads us That Scene, one of the most notorious scenes in cinema history.

We discover that Nick has a lot of problems. He’s undergoing counselling by Dr Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn). It seems he has a habit of shooting people, including (unfortunately) a couple of innocent bystanders. He shot a couple of tourists and was almost certainly coked to the eyeballs at the time. He was cleared of that killing by Internal Affairs but they conveniently forgot to do a drug test at the time. He now claims that he’s given up cocaine, booze and smoking and he’s doing just fine but he is clearly a seething cauldron of suppressed rage that could blow at any moment. Beth gives him a clean bill of health, possibly because they had an affair and she’s still in love with him. There’s not a single authority figure in this movie who behaves ethically.

Nick discovers that quite a few people connected with Catherine have died. He also knows that she’s having a lesbian relationship with Roxy (Leilani Sarelle). Catherine has a complicated life.

There’s also the matter of her book. A year before the murder of the ex-rock star Catherine had written a novel about a murder which occurred in precisely the same way. Which could mean she is guilty. Or it could mean someone has read the book and is using it to frame her. The book serves as a kind of alibi - no jury is ever going to believe that anyone would be dumb enough to describe a murder in detail in a book and then commit the murder. The book means that the chances of convicting Catherine of the murder are practically nil. Of course it could be a double-bluff - Catherine could have done the killing knowing that the book would serve as an aibi.

Nick thinks Catherine is guilty. He also desperately wants to have sex with her. And Catherine is thoroughly enjoying herself playing with him.

Catherine is now writing another book, about a detective who falls for the wrong girl and dies for it. Is this the fate in store for Nick?

Another murder, this time a shooting which seems to be connected, adds further complications.

The plot would have provided the basis for a very good erotic thriller and this movie does indeed work very well on that level. There is however a whole lot more going on here.

There’s an obvious clash between the world of reason, logic, order and conventional morality and the chaotic world of passion, emotion and lust. The world of the basic instinct from which the movie gets its title, the sex instinct. The cops, the authority figures and most of the male characters represent the world of reason. Catherine represents the world of passion and sex. Nick is caught between the two, because when that basic instinct kicks in men are drawn into the world of women where passion is more important than reason. So there’s a kind of war between the sexes theme but it’s more complicated than that because men and women, no matter how much they may come into conflict, are inexorably attracted to each other.

And perhaps it’s not so much the two worlds of men and women, but the two worlds of those who fear the power of sex and try to control it and those who embrace it. Catherine accepts her sexual urges. She feels no guilt about sex. When she wants sexual pleasure she takes it. She represents what the forces of order fear most - a woman who ignores the rules that society has constructed in order to control sex. But she’s not quite the traditional vamp. When she uses men for sex she makes it clear to them what she’s doing. When she plays elaborate psycho-sexual games with Nick she makes sure he knows she’s playing those games. If he chooses to keep playing that’s up to him.

It’s a movie that upset a lot of feminists but in fact it’s not in any way an anti-woman movie. It’s just brutally realistic about sex. It might be a politically incorrect movie but it’s basically pro-woman and pro-sex. Sex is dangerous but it’s dangerous for everybody and if it wasn’t dangerous it wouldn’t excite us so much. Unlike so many movies that deal with sex this movie doesn’t tell us that sex is bad and will destroy us. What will destroy us is a failure to accept the real nature of our sexual urges.

There are countless Hitchcock references (Verhoeven is a major admirer of Hitchcock). Catherine is clearly meant to remind us of Kim Novak in Vertigo. There are lots of nods to Vertigo, but the voyeurism which is such a major part of Basic Instinct clearly comes from Rear Window. The scene in which Nick watches Catherine undressing in front of the window of her beach house is a very obvious Rear Window reference. It’s one of two scenes in which Nick observes her undressing. In both cases Catherine not only knows she’s being watched but enjoys it. So, in contrast to Rear Window, in this movie the woman being watched is an active rather than a passive participant. In fact, assuming that Catherine is in fact inviting Nick to watch her, the woman is the active participant. Basic Instinct does constantly challenge our ideas about which partner is the dominant partner.

Catherine is clearly the femme fatale although as the movie progresses we find there may be three femmes fatales, any one of whom could be the killer.

Nick is the noir protagonist and he’s a very very flawed protagonist. The meeting between Nick and Catherine is a meeting between a dangerous man and a dangerous woman.

I’ve never liked Michael Douglas but I have to admit he’s superb in this movie. Sharon Stone is extraordinary. She was born to play Catherine Tramell.

Thematically there’s a lot of film noir in this movie but visually it’s one Hitchcock reference after another. Not just references to particular Hitchcock scenes but to Hitchcock’s entire visual style and approach to movie-making. Verhoeven and Brian de Palma (especially in Body Double) may be the only directors who have been able to take so much inspiration from Hitchcock without ever seeming like mere copyists. Basic Instinct is truly an example of what art is all about - taking inspiration from another artist to create something genuinely new.

I also love the artificiality of Basic Instinct. This is not the real world. This is an imaginary hyper-real world with its own rules and its own logic. It doesn’t even look like the real world. It looks much better than the real world. This is the world of movies. This is a world in which interrogation rooms in police stations are created by interior designers in such a way as to make female suspects look as beautiful and alluring as possible.

The Australian Blu-Ray release (which is absurdly cheap) comes loaded with extras including two audio commentaries. One is by Camille Paglia (a huge fan of the movie) who has lots to say about the femme fatale, the other features Verhoeven and the movie’s cinematographer. Fans of the movie will find both commentaries worthwhile.

Basic Instinct is a movie that could not possibly be made today. It’s too grown-up, too intelligent, too provocative, too unsettling, too sexy, too honest. All things that Hollywood no longer wants to know about.

Basic Instinct is one of the last great Hollywood movies, and it is a truly great movie. Very highly recommended.

Showgirls (1995), Blu-Ray review

Paul Verhoeven’s infamous 1995 film Showgirls may not be the most critically reviled movie of all time but it has to be right up there in the top five. That in itself makes it interesting. I’d already seen the movie twice but recently I gave in to temptation and bought it on Blu-Ray (I already own it on DVD). I guess that has to make me a serious Showgirls fan. And I’m not ashamed.

For those who believed the critics and avoided this film the plot is straightforward. Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) arrives in Las Vegas with a dream. She wants to be a showgirl. She wants to be a superstar showgirl, like the famous Cristal Connors. She is aiming for the top, but she has to start at the bottom, working in a sleazy strip joint called Cheetah’s. She gradually works her way up. All she needs is one big break. If only by some amazing stroke of fortune she could take over Cristal Connors’ spot for one night then the world would recognise Nomi as a star. But will stardom be worth it? It’s pretty much 42nd Street but with lots and lots of nudity.

There are several ways to approach Showgirls. The easiest way is to just accept the almost universal opinion of critics at the time (and since) that it’s a spectacularly bad movie, one of the biggest turkeys of all time. The second approach is to see it as triumph of unintentional camp. Most fans of the movie (and it does have a genuine cult following) approach it this way. The third approach is to consider the possibility that the movie turned out exactly how Verhoeven wanted it to turn out, which means having to try to understand what he was actually trying to do.

I personally reject the first approach out of hand. If mainstream critics are united in reviling a particular film I immediately want to see that film. Sometimes it turns out that the critics were right but often such a film turns out to be something wondrously strange and delightful. Mainstream critics are generally incapable of understanding cult movies. Usually they ignore such movies, but Showgirls was a big-budget major-studio production so they couldn’t do that. So they savaged it.

The second approach has a lot to be said for it. Showgirls is about as camp as a movie can possibly be. Gloriously so. There are lots of moments when you ask yourself what on earth was Verhoeven thinking, or perhaps what was he smoking? Showgirls takes trashiness to places other movies never thought of going.

The third approach can be interesting. The first thing you have to do is to accept that some of the criticism levelled at Showgirls really do miss the point. For example it might be quite true that the world of superstar Las Vegas showgirls who are household names existed only in Verhoeven’s imagination. But while most people think of this movie as a Vegas movie it isn’t really. Verhoeven was not making a movie about Vegas. His target was the entire American media-entertainment world and in fact American consumerism, which (in his view) makes us all whores. I think it’s fair to say that he was also taking a swipe at celebrity worship. You might not agree with him, but those was his intentions. He could just as easily have set the movie in Hollywood but that had already been done many times and it might have been misunderstood as a movie purely about Hollywood. Las Vegas seemed better suited to his purpose. The actual Las Vegas would not have served the purpose so he invented an imaginary Vegas, in which showgirls are like movie stars.

Verhoeven was certainly aiming at satire. It’s not very subtle satire, but then Verhoeven isn’t a particularly subtle director. Verhoeven movies like RoboCop, Starship Troopers and Basic Instinct have many virtues but subtlety isn’t one of them. And even though his movies aren’t subtle they still manage to get misunderstood (Starship Troopers being an obvious example).

If you’re going to take the third approach you also need to look at Elizabeth Berkley’s performance in a new light. She gave exactly the performance Verhoeven wanted. It’s actually a very good performance but Nomi is very very unlikeable (and she is not supposed to be a sweet innocent corrupted by Vegas). It’s an extreme performance but Nomi is an extreme person. Every time she has a chance of having something good in her life she smashes it and then grinds it underfoot. That’s the sort of person she is. She’s like a feral cat that nobody is ever going to be able to tame. Berkley gave a great performance and it was the right performance but it was a performance that repelled and angered critics and her reward was to have her career destroyed.

You have to view all the performances in the light of Verhoeven’s intentions. Judged in conventional acting terms Kyle MacLachlan is stupendously awful as Cristal’s boyfriend (sort of boyfriend in a decidedly unhealthy way) Zack, but within the context of the movie he’s just right. Zack is, like everyone else in the film, a whore. He is whatever people want him to be. Gina Gershon is immense fun as Cristal, going wildly over-the-top at every opportunity. At least Cristal knows she’s a whore and she accepts it.

Molly (Gina Ravera) is Nomi’s only real friend and she’s the only character with any real integrity. Which makes her the least interesting character (it’s that sort of movie). Robert Davi provides amusement as Al, the sleazy manager of Cheetah’s, who exploits his girls but in his own weird depraved way actually cares about them.

If Verhoeven’s objective was to strip away every thread of glamour from the glitzy greedy grasping world of Las Vegas and to expose the utter corruption and emptiness of the dreams it offers (and the dreams that Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry offer) then you’d have to say he succeeds. Showgirls has been much criticised for its lack of genuine eroticism but really that’s the point. This is sex as business. If you want it you can get it but don’t expect it to make you feel good. Vegas will chew up all your dreams and spit them out and that’s what this movie does with breathtaking ruthlessness.

The film also wants to play around with the links between money, power and sex (which again made Vegas an obvious setting). Everybody is playing power games with everybody else and all the power games involve sex. Most obviously there’s the bizarre three-way dynamic between Nomi, Cristal and Zack. Everything that happens between these three is about power, made most explicit in the infamous lap dancing scene with Cristal pulling the strings but with Nomi making a bid to take control. The power struggles between Nomi and Cristal never stop. Nomi wants money and fame but mostly she wants control.

Verhoeven did however have other intentions as well. Like so many European intellectuals he seems to have had a love-hate relationship with America. While he’s mercilessly demolishing the American dream he’s clearly besotted with American pop culture and he sincerely wanted to make Showgirls as a big-budget musical. Not quite a traditional Hollywood musical, but a Hollywood musical nonetheless.

Verhoeven was (or rather is) also a director obsessed with religious symbolism and it’s no coincidence that the show which Cristal headlines is called Goddess. The bizarre routines in the show are clearly meant to be a kind of pagan celebration of sexuality, and there’s Catholic symbolism as well.

There are times when Showgirls really does hit the target. James, the black dancer with whom Nomi becomes almost emotionally involved, wants her to give up stripping and join him in doing real dancing with serious artistic intentions but when we see his arty dance routine it’s absolutely no different from what Nomi does at Cheetah’s. James is just a whore as well but he can’t see it. And Cristal sneers that what Nomi does at Cheetah’s is not dancing but her own show at the Stardust is also no different from what Nomi does at the strip club, it’s just more expensively staged. They’re all doing the same thing. Cristal just gets paid more and James deludes himself that he’s doing art.

Joe Eszterhas’s script has been accused of misogyny, which is nonsense. This is a script which is equally brutal to all its characters, male and female. This is misanthropy, not misogyny.

Verhoeven was in fact very happy with the movie, and is still very fond of it. The reality is that nothing quite works as he intended it to, but in a way it still does work. Nothing is believable, the characters are not real people with real human emotions, but that just makes it more fascinatingly weird and hyper-real (or perhaps surreal would be more accurate). This is not reality but it’s a strange alternative kind of reality or unreality. Which perhaps is the point - Vegas is not the real world. Visually Showgirls is also of course wonderfully excessive, again to the point of hyper-reality.

At the end of the day I think the best way to enjoy Showgirls is a combination of the second and third approaches I outlined at the beginning. Verhoeven did succeed in his objective, it just happened to be an objective with which mainstream critics and audiences were violently out of sympathy and it happened to succeed in a very strange sort of way.

It can certainly be enjoyed as a weirdly mesmerising exercise in extreme camp or even out-and-out kitsch, but it’s more enjoyable if you also view it as a movie with serious intentions that often fails but in failing it succeeds on a whole different level of weirdness. Most bad movies are either just bad or they’re just bad movies that are so crazy that they’re entertaining. Showgirls is something else again. It’s bad in conventional terms but it achieves a kind of greatness all its own. They don’t make movies like this any more. In fact nobody ever made movies like this. Except Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas.

It’s essential to realise that the film’s trashiness and emotional emptiness and it’s unerotic eroticism are deliberate. These were not mistakes on the part of the director and the writer. They were conscious choices.

Showgirls flopped badly on its original release but has since made a ton of money.

Showgirls has had quite a few DVD and Blu-Ray releases (testifying to its enduring cult appeal). The UK Blu-Ray from Pathé offers a good transfer with a few extras. I reviewed the DVD release of Showgirls quite a few years back.

There is no other movie quite like Showgirls. It’s totally off-the-wall but it’s hypnotic and insanely entertaining once you allow yourself to become immersed in its bizarre alternate universe. It creates its own genre. Personally I just love this movie, almost to the point of obsession. Highly recommended.