Spetters (Netherlands, 1980)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Starring Hans von Tongeren, Toon Agterberg, Maarten Spanjer, Renee Soutendijk

Long before he unleashed his particular brand of filmmaking on an unsuspecting Hollywood, Paul Verhoeven was kicking up a fuss in his native Netherlands with a series of playfully provocative films. Having won acclaim for period dramas Katie Tippel and Soldier of Orange, Spetters was the film which set the tone for his later career: lambasted in the press but loved by audiences, and with Verhoeven always having the last laugh.Spetters is a coming of age film set in and around Rotterdam, which follows the stories of three young men aiming to become motocross racing champions. In the manner of all Verhoeven films, it marries full-on sex, violence and strong language with subtle and often intelligent insights into the human condition. The title epitomises this, being both slang for pretty young men and a word meaning 'splatters' - the sound the chip pan fat makes when the female lead tips it down the naked chest of a leather-clad thug.Spetters is what you would get if you put The Wild One, Rebel Without A Cause and Saturday Night Fever in a blender, and then inhaled the contents in the middle of a drunken rave. The latter is most evident in the cocky attitude of the male characters, along with a scene early on of the mechanic Eef showing off in the disco, only to be outclassed by an unnamed rival. The costumes take on elements from all these films, with Eef's penchant for leather nodding towards Marlon Brando and Rutger Hauer's perfect silver hair rivalling anything that John Travolta could produce.As you would expect from a coming of age film, much of Spetters is concerned with our male protagonists trying to score with women and coming away with a little more than bruised egos. And coming in the middle of the gross-out wave of Animal House, Porky's and Lemon Popsicle, it's only natural to anticipate that such scenes would leave a sour, guilty taste in the mouth. But such scenes are also a showcase for Verhoeven at his best: setting up a given situation, allowing things to turn a little seedy, and then defying our expectations with a cracking punch-line.Two examples in Spetters illustrate this ability. The first comes in the disco when one of the men starts chatting up a black woman. He buys her a beer and starts to stroke her leg, flirting with her in a typically unsubtle way. Despite her protestations, he puts his hand under her dress - and brings it out with a strange yellow gunk on his fingers. We grimace in disgust, only to burst into raucous laughter when the woman lifts up her dress to reveal a jar of mustard between her legs. Talk about taking precautions.The second such instance comes soon after, when two of the bikers and their respective girlfriends have snuck onto a building site to have sex. Having chosen their spots, one of the girls reveals that she is on her period - which the boyfriend grossly demonstrates by bringing up two bloody fingers. Hearing his friend moaning and panting next door, he asks the girl to fake having sex with him, and together they try to out-moan their friend. Having assumed that the other couple are having great sex, Verhoeven then cuts to a wide shot which shows said couple doing exactly the same!

But the wild antics of these men are not confined to the bedroom. The racing sequences in Spetters are shot with real energy and panache: Verhoeven gets his camera in close and uses long takes, so that when the spectacular crashes happen, we think that people are genuinely getting hurt. The sense of youthful vigour present in these scenes prevents them from becoming gratuitous: Verhoeven clearly identifies with the drives and urges of these young men, and has sought to communicate this in the most natural way he knows.Having taken its time in setting up the three main characters, Spetters really gets into gear when the main love interest arrives in the shape of Fientje, played with feisty abandon by Renée Soutendijk. She arrives inauspiciously with her brother in tow to run a fast food van in the centre of town, but over the course of the film she seduces all three men, ruining the life of Rien and Eef and changing Hans' destiny forever.The film sets up Fientje as a dangerous outsider whom the community does not accept. The only reason the police allow her and her brother to stay is because she gives the officer a 'cup of coffee' (in other words, a sexual favour). Eef's father, who is a devout Calvinist, goes so far as to brand her a "whore of Babylon". But as with Verhoeven's subsequent works, particularly The Fourth Man and Basic Instinct, the role of 'evil women' is not quite as clear cut as would first seem.Spetters, like all Verhoeven's best work, calls characters' identities into question and leaves us confused as to whom we are really rooting for. The device of seduction is employed to show just how much there is to becoming a man - in other words, there is more to finding out who you are than losing your virginity, or scoring with the best woman in town. Fientje's own motivations are up for debate: she starts as a serial maneater, a femme fatale who wants Rien's riches for a new fur coat. But in the end she is confused as the others, unsure of herself and of her fate.There is some kind of moral point in the fate of the three men. Rien is seduced by the money Fientje gets him through sponsorship, but he ends up losing the only woman he really loved. When he finally gets the chance to express it, he is unable to do so: the accident has claimed not only his ability to perform sexually, but all his accompanying confidence and self-esteem.Eef desperately wants to seduce Fientje, but the more time he spends with her, the more he becomes convinced that he is deceiving himself - a conviction which culminates in him coming out as gay and hooking up with her brother. It's an odd way to find yourself, but the end point, the realisation of identity, is the same. Meanwhile Hans, the best-endowed of the group, should be first in line to claim Fientje as his own. But being too shy and inept to pull her, he ends up making something of himself and wins her heart by seeing her as something more than a possible conquest.Naturally, all this seduction results in a lot of nudity. Sometimes the flesh-bearing is funny, such as an early sequence of Rien, Eef and Hans in the garage measuring their manhoods with a spanner. But others are deeply uncomfortable, like the very tough sequence of Eef being gang-raped in the subway after stealing from a gigolo. Even for long-term Verhoeven fans, who are used to this kind of thing, you will start to lose patience as the film tips further into lazy soft-core territory.Alongside its rampant nudity, Spetters pulls no punches when it has to get violent. Outside of the dangerous racing early in the film, there is one particularly wince-inducing moment where Rien suffers an accident that will leave him crippled. Having been hit in the face by a bag of orange peel, Rien goes flying from his bike, rolls down the verge and (in tight close up) catches his leg on a stone pillar. Having made us squirm and then laugh before, Verhoeven turns that approach on its head to effectively show the demise of this character. The end comes with Rien trundling his electric wheelchair back to the motorway to kill himself - a scene made all the more harrowing by the fact that actor Hans von Tongeren took his own life two years later.Spetters is a visceral and often hilarious comedy-drama which offers plenty in the way of thrills and spills. Like a lot of coming of age stories, its plot is far too thin, and it resorts to a few too many gross-out moments to keep us interested. But in the sections when it works, it finds Verhoeven firing on all cylinders, delivering substance in the midst of violent sleaze. It's not up there with The Fourth Man or his early work in Hollywood, but it remains good, guilty-pleasure fun.

Rating:
Verdict: Raucous and relentless

Basic Instinct (USA, 1992)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Starring Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn

Erotic thrillers have never had much by way of credibility. They have a reputation for being cheesy, lurid and sleazy, and are often lumped together with horror movies as the stuff that 'sensible', 'reasonable' citizens wouldn't touch with a twenty-foot pole. But as with horror, some erotic thrillers manage to explore interesting, often edgy ideas in amidst the gratuitous sex scenes and clunky dialogue. Basic Instinct is one such film.Although the groundwork had been laid by Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct was the film which brought the erotic thriller into the mainstream. The controversy surrounding its R rating in America and misplaced allegations of homophobia created a whirlwind of publicity, which catapulted Sharon Stone to short-lived stardom and made an entire generation give in to guilty pleasure, if only for a couple of hours.

In bringing the erotic thriller to the multiplex, there is surprisingly little attempt on the part of anyone to sanitise the content, or make changes that would make the story less cheesy. The opening 20 minutes are pure cheese, as people take their clothes off with abandon, detectives trudge around in dark suits, and Catherine Tramell sashays around delivering every line like it's a turn-on. Joe Eszterhas' script is chock full of absurd one-liners that would have made Greg Dark proud - the best being the detectives' remark that the first victim "got off before he got offed".
As well as being everything you'd expect from an erotic thriller, Basic Instinct is everything you'd expect from a Paul Verhoeven film - it's sleazy, trashy, cheesy, and quite good fun. Verhoeven was in his commercial prime, having made a splash with Robocop and Total Recall, and had explored sexual crime previously in The 4th Man. Basic Instinct may have opened the floodgates for a wave of worse films, from the Demi Moore vehicle Striptease to William Friedkin's Jade, but outside of its legacy it is a smarter film than has often been assumed.As with Total Recall, Basic Instinct begins with a big shock to separate the men from the boys. During the opening credits, with Jerry Goldsmith's eerie soundtrack and the movements in mirrored glass, we see the name of Rob Bottin - the make-up artist who did the effects on Total Recall and The Thing. His presence perplexes us: why would an erotic thriller need its own special effects boffin? Then you see the killer's ice pick go through the face and neck of Johnny Boz, and you sit there frozen to the spot, with no further questions.Basic Instinct is a deeply stylised film, which never feels the need to be visually realistic if a creative decision would enhance the mood of a given scene. In the famous interrogation scene, Verhoeven's long-time collaborator Jan de Bont lights the bunker-like room very unusually. Instead of having both parties in equal amounts of light, Catherine Tramell is lit in blinding white light coming from the floor, while the detectives are shrouded in darkness. This gives things a prominent noir feel while conveying the theme of women being in control: the detectives become like voyeurs, wishing to gaze longingly at Catherine without showing too much of their faces.This scene brings on to one of the big talking points in Basic Instinct, namely the gratuitous nudity. We know what to expect up to a point: it wouldn't be an erotic thriller without some flesh, and the film is helmed by the man who left teenage boys drooling at the sight of a three-breasted woman from Mars. But even by those standards, the level of sex or nudity is way over-the-top. The film may not be totally exploitative in its treatment or depiction of women, but it does tip over into base titillation in several scenes. The moment where Sharon Stone crosses her legs is pure exploitation: to all those in denial, it's clearly not her thigh showing up on screen!Like many attempts to bring something inherently trashy or silly into the mainstream, the story of Basic Instinct is contrived to the point of being ridiculous. The most obvious example of this is the level of intuition which Catherine Tramell possesses: it's one thing being able to guess what someone is going to say, but always being in the same place as the detective is a whole different matter. In its action moments it often gets completely silly, asking us to believe that Michael Douglas could participate in a high-speed chase only seconds after being knocked down by a car.It will be clear by now that Basic Instinct is not a film for the faint-hearted, either in its full-on visual style or its blatant disregard for narrative cohesion. But once we have gotten past the sleaze, and the violence, and the smoking, and the swearing, and the silly action scenes, we do begin to see something going on beneath the surface, which turns into that kernel of substance buried deep in the heart of Verhoeven's work.All of Verhoeven's films are essentially about questions of identity. In Robocop, how much is Murphy still a man and how much is he a machine? In Total Recall, has Quaid really been to Mars, or is the whole thing an implant? In Basic Instinct, the question revolves around Catherine Tramell and the motivations behind her unusual behaviour. Is she purely and simply the Devil, who taunts men for sport and uses her books to cover up her brutal murders? Or is she someone with a warped mind who is caught up in these events, someone who craves attention but has no desire to kill for it?The wanton nature of the character is designed not merely to titillate, but to explore - albeit broadly - the sexual independence of women. Catherine doesn't need men to control her or define her in any way, and her actions are not motivated by a direct Freudian urge, e.g. craving affection to make up for the fact that Daddy showed her none. She treats men and women equally as playthings, taking the dominant role in every relationship.This brings us on to the position of gay and lesbian groups, who used the film to attack what they perceived as Hollywood homophobia. The film may be clichéd in its depiction of lesbianism or bisexuality on an aesthetic level - all the lesbians in the film are still dolled-up and attractive enough to make them naturally appealing to men. But Basic Instinct is not homophobic in its view of sexual preference as a lifestyle choice. It maturely chooses not to make an issue of Catherine's sexuality; in other words, who she sleeps with has no direct bearing on whom or why she kills.

The film borrows heavily from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, with Verhoeven restaging certain sections involving the Golden Gate Bridge or the various steep staircases. There is a close parallel between the characters, with Michael Douglas being driven to obsession and Sharon Stone harbouring some kind of self-destructive impulse. One could say this is what a Hitchcock film would have looked like had such levels of sex and violence been acceptable in the 1950s.In the end, however, Verhoeven's efforts to keep things totally ambiguous don't quite work as well as in Total Recall. While there are moments in which it is reasonable to believe that Catherine isn't completely insane, the final act in which Beth Garner is 'revealed' as the killer feels too contrived to cut the mustard. Jeanne Tripplehorn's character has been so peripheral up until this point that we never really believe she could have done it, even if all the plot points add up.While it never reaches the heights of The 4th Man or Verhoeven's previous Hollywood efforts, Basic Instinct remains an enjoyable thriller which manages to raise a number of intelligent issues even in its most lurid moments. It has more than its share of problems, either relating to its plot or the inherent cheesiness of the erotic thriller genre. But as a guilty pleasure or something a little smarter than you'd think, it demonstrates that, once in a while, embracing trash is not such a bad thing.

Rating:
Verdict: Sleazy, trashy, cheesy - and quite good fun