Paul Verhoeven, out-De Palmaing De Palma while sticking it to his critics -- jauntily depraved romping, sexualized rhetoric, and outrageously obvious Catholic-guilt imagery. The opener follows a spider crawling over a Christ figure, then cuts to Jeroen Krabbé, the antihero, shivering in bed (cock out, natch) before meeting his own black widow, delectable Renée Soutendijk, a template for the director’s ice-blondes. A sybaritic writer, gay, alcoholic and Catholic, penniless but famous, he announces "I lie the truth" at the convention’s podium, a low-angle shot followed by a tilt down from a clock to Soutendijk, who’s to bed him for the night. Krabbé cups her tits as she rides him to accentuate her minx-androgyny, though the "beautiful boy" he seeks is hunky Thom Hoffman, her lover, reason enough for him to stick around despite the insistent barrage of visions and forebodings. A room’s number morphs into a peeping orb, which promptly pops out and oozes; a pair of scissors dives between his thighs to emerge with a gorily severed dick; Hoffman replaces Jesus on a cross, the writer kissing his feet then groping his Speedo-clad package. Crucifixes, Samson and Delilah on the Amsterdan train ride, hearses and a key emerging, like the barrel of a gun, from a rose boucquet, leading to three dripping carcasses -- succubus Soutendijk’s unfortunate ex-husbands, each met with a gruesome end. Who’s next? The religious symbolism is literally spelled out in neon, yet Verhoeven and screenwriter Gerard Soeteman hardly view the character’s morbidity and spiritual dislocation as a goof: if anything, all the sardonic capering, toeing parody, encases narrowly-escaped divine retribution, Mary as a nurse wheeling the sinner into a white room. The exuberantly tawdry black comedy mixes reality and fantasy to double-back on cinema and movie-watching, the medium’s voyeurism poked by following Krabbé’s viewing of Soutendijk’s home-made reels with peeking into her bedroom antics with Hoffman. Is it any wonder that ramming punishment comes straight into the eyes? Cinematography by Jan De Bont. With Dolf de Vries, and Geert de Jong.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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