The Oct 10th issue of Time Magazine has a very brief “First Look” at Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction. The subtitle must be referring to the producers. Really, this is up there in the Obvious Bad Idea department with that atrocious looking Steve Martin Pink Panther remake.
Basic Instinct was a (as people often forget) pretty decent, if sleazy, movie made by a director, Paul Verhoeven, just starting to slightly slack off his prime of RoboCop and Total Recall. After the cataclysmic Showgirls, he failed to rebound with Starship Troopers and Hollow Man, and just now is filming his first film in six years.
Aside from Verhoeven, BI boasted Michael Douglas at the peak of his star power, and more importantly the first mass media glimpse of a celebrity hoo-haw. However, thanks to the Internet, celebrity hoo-haws are now all over the place. Plus, Ms. Stone is now 47, and while it is for some reason considered by many to be retrograde to say so, the number of horny viewers hoping for a good look at a (admittedly well-preserved) 47 year-old woman is probably limited. Meanwhile, a number of Brit co-stars have been brought in, presumably to class up the joint, which in itself is pretty hilarious. In any case, I doubt if male lead David Morrissey will prove an able fill-in for Douglas.
Then there’s the fact that the Erotic Thriller genre, as a theatrical movement, all but died after the huge success of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. (Although it launched a seeming thousand Shannon Whirrey DTV movies.) Madonna’s hilarious Body of Evidence is only the most obvious example. However, it’s instructive to note that even the ‘appeal’ of seeing an America’s Sweetheart like Meg Ryan do the naked nasty wasn’t enough to rouse any interest in 2003’s In the Cut.
This is clearly why Hollywood’s can barely be effectively parodied, the making of a sequel to a 12 year old erotic thriller starring a nobody and a woman eight years away from getting her AARP card.
