With a worldwide boxoffice gross of $350 million and a career-transforming role for Sharon Stone as the seductive and possibly deadly novelist Catherine Tramell, work on a sequel to 1992's "Basic Instinct" has been under way for years. The original film, a giddy pulp-fiction stew of sex, seduction and murder, afforded director Paul Verhoeven a shock corridor in which he coupled the unbridled eroticism of his earlier Dutch films with images of brutal violence and death. Love it or hate it, the film, written by Joe Eszterhas, was a tour de force of provocation in which a femme fatale and a corrupt cop throw decorum to the wind to romp in a sun-drenched California, featuring camera angles worthy of Hitchcock and a nerve-teasing score by Jerry Goldsmith.

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