::cease to exist

I think this is all of the original review for The Fourth Man, with all the editing errors intact.


"A gleefully deranged and deviant fantasia of religious and carnal imagery, Paul Verhoeven’s The Fourth Man centers on the psychosexual crisis plaguing a writer played by Jeroen Krabbé. Director Paul Verhoeven’s writer. A man who states, “I lie the truth,” Krabbé is introduceds Krabbé naked and fantasizing about murdering his gay lover—, this after Verhoeven openings the film with the sight of a spider cocooning flies caught in its web, which in turn segues into visions of Christ on the cross. That mixture of perverse violence, predatory danger, and Catholic guilt comes to defines Krabbé’s saga once he journeys to southern Holland for a lecture, and where he meets falls in with icy, androgynous blonde Renée Soutendijk. Covering her breasts in bed to make her look more like a boy, Krabbé Covering her breasts in bed to make her look more like a boy, Krabbé falls in with Soutendijk. but However, he trulyactually pines for Soutendijk’s her hunky boy toy Thom Hoffman, whose sexual shortcomings se lack of stamina in the bedroom Krabbé promises to fix—mainly, it eventually turns out, —by attempting to seduce him in the mausoleum housing the cremated remains of Soutendijk’s three deceased husbands.



Verhoeven and cinematographer Jan de Bont drench the twisted narrative in all manner of symbolic motifs, crafting a dreamlike atmosphere of paranoia, fear, and lust—themes the duo would revisit almost a decade later in Basic Instinct. That twisted narrative is drenched in all manner of symbolic motifs by Verhoeven, who—working with cinematographer Jan dDe Bont, who would go on to direct the Hollywood action movie Speed—crafts a dreamlike atmosphere of paranoia, fear, and lust. Panicked by the idea that Soutendijk is a black widow, and that he’s destined to be who intends to make him her fourth victim, Krabbé navigates a landscape where the where there are no boundaries betweenboundaries between reality and reality and nightmare :cease to exist. Allusions to Samson and Delilah mix freely with Krabbé’s hallucinations about eyeballs popping out of their oozing sockets, a red Speedo-clad Hoffman on the cross, and Soutendijk castrating him in bed with the same scissors she uses at her salon. Coupled with Krabbé’s deliriously over-the-top performance, the director’s and Verhoeven’s in-your-face approach renders the materialmake it all a jet-black comedy.



Meanwhile, the appropriations of stylistic tropes from Buñuel, Hitchcock, and De Palma are merely another example of the film’s overriding prankster-ish humor."