As an artist, Paul Verhoeven legitimized smut.
His filmography through the 80s and 90s put bloody carnage and nudity front and center for its audience, and his science fiction pictures would slot in to a particular niche of their own. Verhoeven is a director who made movies where bad guys are torn apart by machine gun fire from close range, bodies explode, and blood showers from the remaining stumps. Fast-paced and exciting, they felt like well-directed pornos for cinephiles. Aptly, with a mostly male-dominated following, your standard Verhoeven fan watches one of his flicks and mirrors that of the policemen in his own Basic Instinct — craving and eagerly awaiting that next kill like we, too, were also gawking and drooling at the quick flash between the probable murderer's legs.
Since his heyday throughout the 90s, the director disappeared during different hiatus', only making a film every five or six years apart. His work came back quieter and less commercial than his previous outings, and in foreign languages (like the phenomenal Black Book). They swapped out the Arnold Schwarzenegger muscles and machine guns for stories more contained, but often no less raw, human, and, yes... inevitably controversial.
6 Showgirls (1995)
- MGM/US Distribution Co.
In the (excellent) Scream 2, resident film geek Randy is finally asked what his favorite scary movie is. He replies, "Showgirls."
Universally derived on release, Showgirls is certainly a lot. Showgirls follows the journey of Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley), as she tries to make it as a dancer in Vegas. Teaming up once more with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (following *that* scene in Basic Instinct), it's a movie that is intense and slutty in its direction, with the nudity in this picture honestly becoming gratuitous from how frequent it is, earning an NC-17 rating. The movie (and the connotations surrounding it) damaged both Berkley's and Kyle McLachlan's careers.
That said, watching the movie in this century does show off a story that is more than prepared to talk about the underbelly of show business, and the depravity of a place like Las Vegas. The choreographed dance numbers are also very impressive and highly sexualized throughout, even if they're lumbered in between some dramatically awful dialogue. It's still your dad's favorite movie.
5 Hollow Man (2000)
Hollow Man is a pretty uneasy movie to like. From the off, the movie does its best to tell you that Sebastian Caine, an arrogant and brilliant scientist, is not a good guy by way of a bad-taste joke. Creating a serum that can render its user invisible, Caine essentially becomes a super villain, using his newfound power purely for his own needs - and at the severe expense of others.
Hollow Man's content is a little difficult to get behind, and Kevin Bacon plays jarringly against type as someone loathsome, but the effects in this are still extraordinary and imaginative, and it is refreshing to see a movie with the perspective of a villain as the main character. 2019s The Invisible Man would flip the script once more, while sticking to similarly dark themes, as it focused on an abuse survivor, though was praised exponentially more.
4 Basic Instinct (1992)
Basic Instinct marked its 30th anniversary earlier this year, and remains a true snapshot of a time in the 1990s. Following on from Michael Douglas' success with Fatal Attraction (largely the only other steamy sexual thriller that most people remember), Basic Instinct could quite easily be a straight sequel to the 1987 bunny-boiling classic.
Perhaps summing up Verhoeven's career the most succinctly, it's a movie that is violent, sexual, and sleazy. With Sharon Stone, who many considered to be the hottest woman on the planet at the time, as the possible icepick murderer, Detective Nick Curran can't help but get involved with her. This film is still hot to touch, its '90s fashion is impeccable, and its stars are magnetic.
3 Starship Troopers (1997)
Here at MovieWeb, we adore Starship Troopers, a satirical war movie that hits you with the bluntest of force with the underside of its boot, and guarantees a ridiculously fun time as a result.
Cleverly, in between the clichéd love triangle and ongoing bug-based conflict, scattered throughout the movie are fake commercials urging its audience to enlist in the army and "do their part" for the war effort. Starship Troopers' epic action sequences and set pieces take place in whole battle zones on far off distant planets, containing strange icky and sticky violent aliens ready to be ripped apart by heavy artillery. KILL 'EM ALL!
Avoid the sequels. They sucked.
2 RoboCop (1987)
In a futuristic Detroit, a city eroded by crime, a new experimental police officer is created: RoboCop. RoboCop is totally ridiculous and so entirely 80s (robot films and cop films were both respectively in at the time, so it made sense to quite literally combine the two), but *damn* is it cool in a stupid way. Once again, this is another movie that would highlight Verhoeven's lust for the hyper violent, men and women, and the simplest of good vs evil, along with the director's penchant for parody.
So much of this picture has made its way in to science fiction lore - the gargantuan ED-209 counting down TWENTY SECONDS TO COMPLY, the rapist shot through his victim's skirt and in the crotch, and Murphy's own execution scene are all so far out and extreme that it just makes up that wild west world that was the fictionalized Detroit. RoboCop's view of big companies all being corporate and evil is so fun to watch, especially when the suits in charge are torn apart by bullets.
1 Total Recall (1990)
The scope on Total Recall is really so tremendous that you'll believe that you're on Mars, just like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Doug Quaid, a man uncertain if he's living a dream or not... Based on a Phillip K. Dick short story (titled We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), and following Robocop, the Schwarzenegger/Verhoeven team up just made so much sense.
Here was a superstar well known for creating sci-fi hyper violence in movies like Terminator and Predator, and a director more than excited to pile it on. Watch in awe of Total Recall's spectacular settings and mutant makeup here. There are far too many good scenes just to name one, but watch out for the escalator/human shield scene. The Total Recall remake with Colin Farrell in 2012 was exceptionally dreadful, but this Verhoeven film is masterfully enjoyable.