BASIC INSTINCT: 4K Blu-ray (Carolco, 1992) StudioCanal

At the time of its release, Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) was the fourth-highest grossing picture of the year, billed as an erotic neo-noir. The film that catapulted Sharon Stone to international stardom, and garnered jeers for the actress’ faux incredulity on national television, after Stone claimed to be caught unaware of the now infamous beaver shot under high-key-lit conditions – Stone’s alter-ego, Catherine Tramell seductively uncrossing her scissor legs to a room-full of police detectives – was not particularly well-received by the critics, primarily for Verhoeven’s gratuitous sex and violence, as crudely scripted by writer, Joe Eszterhas. I recall seeing Basic Instinct on its opening night, without the benefit of knowing exactly what I was in for, though nevertheless being generally turned off by Stone’s trashy flash of pubes, along with the brutally animalistic ‘fuck of the century’ sequence, and pseudo-rape of Jeanne Tripplehorn’s Dr. Beth Garner – both featuring prominent butt shots of an enraged Michael Douglas as San Franciscan Det. Nick Curran. To me, Verhoeven was trying waaaaay too hard to juice up a rather pedestrian thriller – straight-forward to a fault, and painfully relying on Stone’s chooch and boobies, as well as Jan de Bont’s stunningly handsome cinematography of Frisco and its surrounding areas to carry the load while the male victims in this crude pantomime were shooting theirs.

Hiring veteran sexpot long-since past her prime, Dorothy Malone in a practically silent role of paroled serial killer, Hazel Dobkins, and, co-starring George Dzundza, then newly paroled from his tenure on TV’s Law & Order, but still very much wearing Max Greevey’s holster as Nick’s partner, Det. Gus Moran, did little to convince me of Basic Instinct’s integrity as one of the best thrillers of the year…or decade, for that matter. I suspect Verhoeven would consider me precisely the sort of cinema prude to whom his sexual assault on the senses was aimed to shock.  To my credit, I did not run from the theater blinded by my conservative outrage, but rather remained fairly unimpressed by the fringe porn, designed to turn my knickers inside out. With its $352.9 million box office easily eclipsing its $49 million outlay, I was decidedly in the minority in my general disregard of the picture. 

Verhoeven’s modus operandi has always been that he does not shy away from sex or violence because each has its place as a defining force in humanity’s mad inhuman noise. He has a point. But Verhoeven has forgotten there are other points of interest to assemble and contain humanity as a functioning entity. Yet, none of these are represented in Basic Instinct. There is not one character in this show who is basically without vice or suffering from severe emotional baggage, who is not tormented, either by their past or railing against the present, who does not harbor intensely self-destructive impulses to derail not only their base understanding but also threaten their own self-preservation.  So, despite de Bont’s sun-filtered exoticism to perfectly capture the languid splendor of this city by the bay, the inhabitants here are represented as socially repressed, sexually liberated animals who react on impulse alone, without even the remotest fear of being found out. Thus, Verhoeven and Esterhas’ approach to character development rings untrue – unless, of course, virtually every character in Basic Instinct is a raving psychotic.  And then, of course, there is the ‘lesbian angle’ – squarely situated on Catherine’s affair with live-in, Roxanne ‘Roxy’ Hardy (Leilani Sarelle), a real ‘nothing’ of a plot twist; Roxy, insanely jealous of Catherine’s tryst with Nick, and thus to plan his murder. This, decidedly, ends badly when Nick calls Roxy’s bluff, survives being rundown by her in the streets, then deliberately engages his killer in a game of chicken to end with her death, driving over the guardrails into a construction site below.  

Reportedly, Eszterhas wrote Basic Instinct in the eighties, later to engage in a bidding war until Carolco Pictures acquired the rights. Verhoeven and Eszterhas fell in and out of each other’s favor during the shoot, mostly over Verhoeven’s slight tinkering with the script. While the project almost immediately appealed to Michael Douglas, as a sort of extension of the eroticism he had already explored in Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987) Verhoeven had some understandable difficulty finding an established actress willing to partake of his planned nudity.  Sharon Stone had already appeared in Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990). Moreover, she was a ‘fresh face’ then, despite some prominent parts scattered throughout the previous decade. While his leading lady gave him no grief, Verhoeven encountered some major opposition from conservative groups over the picture’s proposed sex and violence, as well as gay rights’ activists adamantly set against yet another broad-brushed depiction of homosexual relationships as basically murderous, drug-addicted and psychotic.

Basic Instinct opens with some stylized credits set to Jerry Goldsmith’s moodily magnificent score. We bear witness to one, Johnny Boz (Bill Cable) – a slightly gone to seed rocker, at present, bouncing a bright young thing straddling his loins. Aside: at the time he appeared in Basic Instinct Cable was, himself, a semi-retired porn star, under contract to the adult film industry’s COLT Studio, and featured prominently in Playgirl, Playboy, Oui, Ah Men, QQ Magazine, After Dark, and, Manpower! – to name but a handful of his credits. Paralyzed from the chest down in a 1996 motorcycle accident, Cable would die a year later from these injuries, age 51. Back to Basic Instinct’s plot – Boz’s unidentified woman reaches for a Hermès white silk scarf she uses to bind her lover’s wrists to his brass twined headboard before removing a concealed ice pick from beneath the sheets and brutally stabbing him to death. The grisly crime discovered some hours later by Boz’s housekeeper, amuses Det. Nick Curran, who is himself newly reformed from the vices of strong drink and drugs. Nick’s superior, Captain Talcott (Chelsie Ross) recognizes the political ramifications of the crime and is disgusted by Nick’s flippancy. Nick’s partner, Gus, is just along for the ride, but increasingly begins to resent Nick’s attraction to their prime suspect, Boz’s gal/pal, the affluent novelist, Catherine Tramell, who is living resplendently off her family’s inheritance and, in one of her previously published trashy books, has described precisely how Boz’s remains were displayed as well as the method of his demise.

Catherine is remote upon her initial questioning by Nick and Gus at her fashionable seaside home, but later, deliberately indulges in an erotic game of cat-and-mouse with Nick and the police, exposing her crotch to all in the middle of their taped interrogation. Catherine admits to enjoying Boz sexually, but resists being referred to as his girlfriend. Eager to get a register on their prime suspect, Nick consults criminal psychologist, Dr. Lamott (Stephen Tobolowsky) who suggests two scenarios – either Catherine is the killer deliberately toying around to see if her clever alibi will hold, or she is being set up by a jealous rival out to destroy her with a frame-up. In the meantime, Nick falls off the wagon, doing shots at a local watering hole and assaulting Lieutenant Marty Nielsen (Daniel von Bargen) in the presence of his fellow officers after Nielsen challenges Nick’s credibility, suggesting he is on the verge of heading into some very dark behaviors that previously resulted in the accidental killing of two tourists, and later, Nick’s involvement with police psychologist, Dr. Beth Garner, assigned to analyze his case. Beth rescues Nick from this sticky altercation – the two, returning to his apartment to expend their energies in more creative ways. Sometime later, Nick is alerted to Nielsen’s murder, shot through the head with a service revolver. Nick is suspended from duty but begins to suspect Catherine has set him up.

Nick does not buy Catherine’s lie detector results for a minute, and later unearths pieces of her past which prove disturbing: her sexual involvement with Roxy, who impulsively murdered her two younger brothers when she was barely sixteen, as well as an enduring friendship with Hazel Dobkins, a middle-aged wife and mother who apparently murdered her husband and children for no reason. Catherine makes it known to Nick she is transparently basing the protagonist of her latest novel on him, wherein his alter ego is murdered after falling for the wrong woman. Suspecting Catherine bribed Nielsen for info sealed in Nick's psychiatric file, the tone of Nick’s investigations grows ominous after he begins an affair with Catherine and she confides in him about a girl she knew while in college under the name of Hoberman who became obsessed, changed her name and appearance to mimic Catherine’s and then began to stalk her. Nick unearths Hoberman’s college professor was later murdered with an ice pick – the crime unsolved. Nick also learns two shocking bits of information – first, Catherine’s parents died under mysterious circumstances, resulting in her instant inheritance, and second, Beth and Hoberman are one in the same. After tracking Catherine and Roxy down at an upscale gay nightclub, and effectively, stealing Catherine from Roxy, Nick is nearly run down in the parking lot of a nearby diner by someone driving Catherine’s sports car. Making chase, Nick engages the unseen driver in a game of chicken. This ends with Catherine’s car sailing over a guard rail.  However, when he rushes to examine the wreck, he discovers Roxy’s remains crushed to death inside.

Blinded by his sexual attraction to Catherine, Nick believes Roxy may have murdered Boz – a scenario that infuriates Gus. Armed with Beth’s real identity, Nick confronts Beth now, who hints it was Catherine who obsessed over her in college, not the other way around. Nick, alas, does not believe her. Arriving at Catherine’s home, Nick finds the final pages of her latest novel still in the printer, detailing how the fictional detective comes across his partner’s slaughtered body in an elevator. Catherine is cruel and breaks off her affair with Nick, ordering him from the house. Later in the evening, Gus informs Nick they are going to meet Beth’s roomie from college who has led Gus to believe she has new information on the murder of their college professor. As Nick is on suspension, he waits in the car while Gus goes into the building to investigate, realizing too late Gus is walking into a trap. Racing into the building, Nick finds Gus’ body stabbed to death in the elevator, and then, discovers Beth emerging from a stairwell nearby. Drawing Gus’ gun on Beth, Nick orders her to raise her hands. When she instead reaches into her pocket, Nick jumps to conclusions and shoots Beth dead, only to discover the keys to his apartment inside her pocket. Evidence at Beth’s apartment suggests she murdered Boz, Nielsen, Moran, and, her own husband. The police also find a scrapbook of news clippings devoted to Catherine, confirming Nick’s suspicions. Confused, Nick returns to his apartment where he discovers Catherine already waiting for him. She feigns a reluctance to commit to anyone, but then allows herself another seduction. During their postcoital embrace, Nick advocates they plan for a future together, the camera panning under the bed to reveal an ice pick.

I think what infuriated me about Basic Instinct upon my initial viewing was its too many red herrings in lieu of the rather obvious and straight-forward suspect, Catherine Trammell. Despite some clever lighting during Boz’s murder, the bouncing breasts and blonde hair of his killer belonged to Sharon Stone, hence her faux astonishment and wily deceptions at the outset of her police interrogation were mere subterfuge to delay the inevitable. But by then, Verhoeven and Esterhas had thoroughly muddied the waters with much misdirection. Roxy’s venomous jealousy of Catherine’s men, Catherine’s friendship with a known murderess, and finally, Beth’s probable ‘lesbian’ obsession with Catherine from their days in college…or was it the other way around?…and the college professor’s killing. It all added up to…well…nothing, because the final ‘big reveal’ explains what was transparent from the outset. Catherine Trammell is a cold-blooded killer.

And yet, instead of a cat-and-mouse game to expose this truth, Basic Instinct steadily devolved into a story about a sincerely warped woman who exploits everyone she comes in contact with to suit the scenarios she later writes about in her pulp fiction. Whether acknowledging it or not, Nick Curran is yet the latest prey in Catherine’s murderous sights. Her delay of the inevitable at the end, does not imply a reprieve or reformation from her plans to eventually do away with her lover. Nevertheless, the ‘hit status’ of the original movie practically guaranteed a sequel. Curiously, it took until 2006 for Basic Instinct 2 to materialize. By then, Michael Douglas was out, and, with zero explanation, his character not even afforded ‘honorable mention’ as a postscript in the new movie, to involve Catherine with Scotland Yard psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Glass – the unwitting, next victim in Tramell's seductive/psychological warfare.  Basic Instinct 2 was directed by Michael Caton-Jones, but savaged in the editing room, yet still to emerge with an ‘R’ rating that did little to bolster its box office. The picture was a flop. Viewed today, Verhoeven’s original remains a bizarre thriller. Much of what played in 1992 as tawdry and provocative has long-since become ho-hum and mainstream. So, the picture’s staying power today rests squarely on the appeal of its two stars – Douglas and Stone. There is still some fire there, especially during their erotic scenes. But the picture is more clearly than ever heavily dependent on that flint and fire to propel the narrative forward to its already foregone conclusion.  Hardly original – even in 1992 – and decidedly prosaic outside of its stylistic elements when viewed today, Basic Instinct is more the footnote than fabulous entre into 90’s darkly purposed crime-solving cinema, initially kick-started by the Oscar-winning, The Silence of the Lambs (1990), and, later to steadily evolve with such certifiable, and endlessly watchable masterpieces as The Fugitive (1993), Se7en (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).

While the picture’s North American distributor, Lionsgate, continues to peddle a mid-grade 1080p transfer derived from a DVD master, in various repackaged Blu-ray re-incarnations, Europe’s StudioCanal has come to the forefront with a native ‘restored’ 4K UHD release struck from the original camera negative under Verhoeven’s supervision. As anticipated, the new 4K remaster is a revelation and easily bests the old Blu-ray. Overall density advances, and all of the old artificial sharpening and edge effects are gone. As much of Basic Instinct is shot under the cover of night, these darker nuances pop as they ought in 4K. Is everything perfect? Hardly. For starters, I recall Basic Instinct favoring deep blues during the police interrogation scene and later, at the gay nightclub. These richly saturated blues, alas, have been suppressed in 4K, leaning to a queer cyan tint. This cyan push afflicts other scenes as well, and also undermines whites and white gradations. Contrast is a tad anemic.  But it’s the color that mostly distracts. Sharpness and depth greatly advance, but minor artifacting is still present. The 5.1 DTS audio sounds excellent. The 4K disc offers a new trailer, an hour-long documentary - Basic Instinct: Sex, Death & Stone, featuring new and exclusive interviews with Stone, Douglas, Eszterhas, Verhoeven, Jan de Bont and others and is an excellent companion piece.  Ported over from the old Blu-ray release, the half-hour, ‘making of’ – Blonde Poison. Another newly produced featurette, An Unending Story – charts Jerry Goldsmith’s contributions and clocks in at 17-mins.  Finally, there’s barely 7-mins. of extended interview snippets and sound bites. Last but not least, we get competing archival audio commentaries, the first from Verhoeven and de Bont from 2007, the second, from feminist critic, Camille Paglia, from 2002. Bottom line: while the 4K remaster of Basic Instinct is not perfect, it does represent a major upgrade from the tired old Blu-ray release. This 4K release also comes with a 2-disc Blu-ray containing the same features. The Blu-ray is ‘region B’ locked and will not play in North America. The 4K disc is ‘region free’ – meaning it will play anywhere in the world. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

5