Word: verhoeven
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...PAUL VERHOEVEN'S thriller opens with a shot of a screen-sized spider devouring its helpless prey. The movie ends on the same picture. While the two hours in between are entertaining enough a witty and sometimes outrageous romance complete with homosexual obsession, witchcraft, and enough lurid fantasy to earn the picture an X. The Fourth Man is nonetheless predictable and studied, almost like a computer's wet dream...
...fantasies, while entertaining in itself, is too clearly just that. We're never left in doubt as to where Reve's psyche--however fevered--ends and reality begins, leading to a progression of events that is studied and deliberate; there are no tricks of perspective, no phantasmagory in Verhoeven's high-tech entertainment...
Buoyed by some stylish exoticism, by Krabbé's ferocious performance as its bedeviled protagonist (a less-gay gay the movies have never offered) and by the mysteriously growing repute of Director Paul Verhoeven (he was responsible for the stodgy Soldier of Orange and the ugly Spelters), The 4th Man is bobbing prosperously along the art circuit, a midsummer night's titillation for the would-be with-its. But the movie's ultimate fate, surely, is to be celebrated, along with Pink Flamingos and its ilk, at the midnight masses of the lavender thrill...
Although director Paul Verhoeven (Soldier of Orange) has a certified hit with Spetters in his native Netherlands, this Dutch version of Saturday Night Fever would have to cross many cultural barriers to be accessible to American youth. Riding motorbikes with glee, munching french fries and mustard, and wrangling with Calvinist consciences, the Spetters (translated Aces) are rebellious youth who "live like there's no tomorrow." The soundtrack consists of second-rate juke box numbers from the Johnny Rotten timevault, but it is probably the flaunted flesh in Spetters which has made it a box office success. There are masturbations, erections...
...students - becomes a cross section of a nation's responses to the Nazi Occupation during World War II. Some become heroes, some become collaborators, some simply get by. Their adventures, mostly the usual arrests by and escapes from the Gestapo, are recounted in a conventional glossy manner. Director Verhoeven obviously has studied the classics of the Occupation-adventure form, and he offers a competent pastiche of them...