On it's release way back in 1992 this had certain womens groups froffing at the mouth with disgust and outrage, but now the film seems allot tamer. Now looking at the film after the flames have died down what you actually are left with is a silly trashy sex thriller.
Michael Douglas sucks in his gut due to his middle age spread, But Sharon Stone sizzles as the bi-sexual ice pick killer. There was allot of fuss due to the leg uncrossing interragation scene, but now that seems tame. Yes the film is guilty of being trashy, but it's done with such style, and sheen, it's impossible not to like the film. Also the film has a outstanding seductive music score by Jerry Goldsmith that adds even more gloss to the movie.
A hugely enjoyable thriller, one of lifes great guilty pleasures!

This film has been slagged off a bit for being overtly sexual, glamourising violence, demonising the gay community etc, etc. Listen, forget all that stuff I found it a really good movie experience. Its got lots of action and yes, there is a fair bit of sex in it but this justs add to the film. Michael Douglas is a bit over the top at times but Sharon Stone is just the epitome of cool. She also looks fantastic. A good buy.

I watched this for the first time afew weeks ago and love d it. It's a tense thriller that has you guessing right till the end of the movie. Being a huge Michael Douglas fan this is definately one of his best movies. Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone have an truly awesome screen chemistry in this movie. For anyone who hasn't seen it just buy it you will love this movie for sure

this movie in years to come will be rightly seen as a classic. beautifully shot, brilliantly acted, sexually atmospheric this is Verhoevan's best film and a brilliant homage to Hitchcock.

After the incendiary science-fiction double-bill of Robocop and Total Recall, Paul Verhoeven sought to redefine another quintessentially American genre with another $100million budget and another one of Hollywood's biggest stars.

Basic Instinct, for all intents and purposes, for all the over-the-top bombast, for all the cliched scenes of seduction and murder, efectively starting the trend for the 1990s neo-noir. It is a scintillating, blistering thriller, shot through with equal parts naughty daftness and tense interplay between the sexes. But it isn't just about the sex scenes, or that particularly famous shot of Stone's specialplace. No, if anything, Verhoeven's tight murder-detective thriller is about how murder and sex ~ the two most basic instincts, in a sense ~ can dangerously collide.

Stone's femme fatale Catherine Tremell is one of the greatest American ice-maidens in the history of cinema, part-Hitchcockian independence and frailty, part-Billy Wilder devious murderess; indeed, throughout most of the scenes with Michael Douglas's Nick, Stone evokes the quiet sexiness of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, the pathological craziness of Glenn Close's Fatal Attraction bunny-boiler, and the steaminess of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. But never has such a mix of the noir woman come into it's own with such explicit 18-certificate madness. Verhoeven, the European director never one to shy away from the exploitation-aesthetic that forms his auteur style, opens the film with Stone being dirty with a rock-star and giving a whole new use for an ice-pick. If Almodovar's Matador began the trend for the ultra-violent feminine thrillers, Instinct's twisty-turny plot and the thematic playfulness of the detective narrative bring a whole new apporach to the representation of women in modern cinema.

Stone, in perhaps the most memorable performance of her career (but perhaps second only to her role as Ginger in Scorsese's Casino in terms of greatest-role), is not just a blatant sex-object and killer. This is the best example of performance-art, of body-language projected so successfully onto the cinema screen; Stone gives a devious glance here, a come-to-bed expression there, and turns Douglas' messed-up cop into a sexual animal. It might be a new lease of life for Nick, but he thinks he can beat her at her own game.

In fact, we can see similarities in Douglas's other charactertypes: in Fatal Attraction, where after a one-night stand, he realises Glenn Close is actually a bit barmy as well as a sexual predator. But along with his D-Fens sociopath in Falling Down and arrogant businessman in The Game, Douglas's most successful type is the perfect representation of male anxiety ~ an anxiety of women, of the world, of the Freudian powerplay of sex.

Tremell pulls Nick into a world full of intrigue and lies and deceit, and as over-indulgent as it may often seem, Verhoeven's plot in pulled further and further into the darkest depths of human behaviour. It is shot through with noirish lighting conflicting with glamour of the California sunshine and the seediness of nightclubs and midnight stalking trips to the beach house. Convention- and formula-driven it may be, but the projection of these in a stylish retro-aesthetic and the frankness of the modern man's desires makes for one of the most interesting thrillers of twentieth-century cinema. In the heyday of the 1940s film noir, Stone's legs would have brought gasps of disbelief, and the fact that Verhoeven goes further is proof that the genre had shaped into something much more dynamic and unpredictable. This is about the psychopathology of gender, the sexual deviance of the psyche, and the Hitchcockian descent into madness.