Sliver (1993) Never have filmmakers' original intentions gone flying off the rail as bad as this one......
The idea here (we think) was to duplicate Paul Verhoven's 1992 pube-revealing sex thriller "Basic Instinct"
You know the formula........slashed bloody corpses, incendiary sex, who's-the-killer mystery, a Joe Eszterhas script.... ..and most importantly............the ultimate 90's glacial blonde, Sharon Stone.
And all of this taken from an Ira Levin novel about a Manhattan high rise with spy cameras in everybody's apartment.......so whenever you floss your molars, take a dump or hump your partner, somebody's watching.......
How could this miss?
Oh my, where to begin........Stone's supposed to be a semi-sympathetic character, which is not in her skill set. The director, Philip Noyce, an efficient enough manager of big budget action films, lacked Paul Verhoven's lurid instinct for over-the-top, operatic melodrama........he's just too classy for
this movie.....
And then there's the insurmountable problem of the film's two scumbag murder suspects.......the loudmouth, obnoxious crime novelist (Tom Berenger) and the creepy Lothario (William Baldwin) who owns Stone's apartment building and watches all all the tenants from a hidden, vast bank of monitors......
An unforeseen accident forced Noyce to abandon the script's overheated finale, in a Hawaiian volcano, no less.....and compelled him to make the plot's real murderer and red herring switch places......
Eszterhas's rickety screenplay, never much good to begin with, couldn't support such a major alteration......rendering the movie senseless and anti-climactic.
........which the film desperately attempted to cover up with a laughable Hail Mary pass.....by having Stone cap the finale with a pathetic tossed off insult.......('Get a life!') a line that seemed more directed to anybody who'd just wasted an hour and 47 minutes watching this in a theater.
That's enough time wasted on this cinematic abortion........time for BQ to get a life......or at least watch a better movie. Worthless from beginning to end, we can't even give a sliver of star to "Sliver".......Zero stars (0). No Basic Instinct here.....just stink.
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