Basic Instinct 2: We just had to (spoilers!)

The Orange advert finished, and the cinema went silent.

Best straight friend Rick turned to me: "Are you really sure you want to go through with this?"

I nodded, staring ahead at the screen, my eyes sparkling.

Rick sighed, and produced a bottle of wine and two glasses. He's classy.

Basic Instinct 2 is not classy. It opens with Sharon Stone having sex in a car with Stan Collymore (I had no idea that "ironic cameo" counted as community service).

Before long, she's fixed her wrinkled eye and potty mouth on poor David Morrissey. He's her therapist, and has lovely offices in the Gherkin. Fuck the facts, it's a symbol.

"Wow," breathed Rick, "What a great chair. I'd shag that chair."

Moments later, Shazza is shagging the chair, while telling David, "Sometimes I masturbate thinking about you mastubarting about me, coming as I come thinking about you masturbating while thinking about me coming while you come. Come masturbate come come wanky wanky come come."

David has nothing to say to this. So Sharon leaves.

"I bet there's a snail trail on that chair," Rick doesn't say.

People start dying. But all we're really noticing is how lovely the film makes London look. Everyone lives in impossibly nice houses - just as David can't possibly work in the Gherkin, so he can't possibly have a flat in the Temple Bar. But he does.

Sharon Stone goes one better. She lives in space. With a jacuzzi. The flat's so lovely no wonder she walks around it naked. She's probably fucked every bit of furniture in it. While thinking about it thinking about her thinking about it. And coming, no doubt. Sharon can't open her mouth without coming coming out of it.

At one point she announces "Beat me up as you fuck me. No, harder." And with that, proves that all women are, of course, evil sluts who deserve it. Sadly, we don't see her doing any housework or baking. Clearly, Germaine Greer was unavailable for a script polish.

David hurries to the East End - all empty streets and rolling fog. "Dear God," breathes Rick, "The victim's living in the only unreconstructed Huguenot cottage. That's got to be worth millions." Like most straight men in London, Rick is very interested in property. For the first time, he seems aroused.

Then something really horrible happens. So jaw-droppingly horrid I could barely watch it, let alone describe it. They go clubbing in Atlantic.

Atlantic used to be my favourite restaurant - like dining on the Titanic. Sadly, it went out of business. Worse, it got bought by that ghastly Ivy-owning gay, who turned it into a steak house. I genuinely thought things couldn't get worse. But no. The filmmakers have turned it into a club. With spinny lights and thumpy music and oh god, oh god, they've not even moved the tables out of the way, so people are dancing around them with their glow sticks and....

Rick patted my hand gently. "There there," he muttered, "You're distracting me from the lesbian sex."

The film carries on, in its meaningless way. The plot has something to do with a hideous magazine called Urbane - from the samples shown on screen, imagine the Big Issue, but really made by tramps. In a sample issue we get to see the phrase "A promsing movie script gets badly...". Twice. Are they trying to tell us something?

David Morrissey has sex. This isn't good. As Rick points out "He may be buff, but he's English. He looks pasty and cold." It's not nice. Especially when shafting a "psychopharmacologist" roughly from behind. His sex face is not pretty.

"Ian Hislop!" cries Rick in a sad voice.

Sharon wanders the streets of London looking for a shag. She offers a rent boy money. He's not happy, but we don't quite hear their conversation. Probably he's telling her "I don't do drag queens."

The film carries on. It even includes Charlotte Rampling as a classy older lady who lives on "Hampstead Street, Hampstead". This is shot in Highgate. She is smoking Mayfair cigarettes (obviously, the props man is from Mars, and thought they were a classy name).

"What is she doing in this film?" I ask Rick.
"Oh, she'll do anything. She shagged a monkey in Max Mon Amour." He paused, whistfully, "You know, anyone could have been in that gorilla suit."

There's a *shocking* twist concerning Sharon's latest novel, which she was writing wrapped occasionally in a bed sheet. "It contains the clue to who's next!" she sneers at David, flashing her ladygarden. Her plastic surgeon has, we discover, stuck her nipples on at the wrong angle. This is weirdly fascinating.

David scours the book for clues. On screen we see, in enormous print, the phrase "She was coming over to fix her Sky box."

This, clearly, tells David everything he needs to know. But will he be in time?

The film ends, inexplicably.

In the epilogue, we meet David Morrissey again. He's fatter and has stopped dying his hair chestnut. He still doesn't quite know what's going on. But then, in the last few frames, as the camera begins to fade and he thinks no-one's looking, he rolls his eyes.

THE END.

PS: I went to see the original Basic Instinct on a school trip. We'd been going to see Hamlet, but had missed the showing, so were ushered into this. Looking back, it's funny how many of my English class turned out gay...