B-movie bomb thrower Paul Verhoeven is back with his sexiest, most outrageous film to date. And, oh, it's about the Holocaust

WAR PIG? Black Book director Verhoeven

A merica is up to its eyeballs in crotch shots, and we have Paul Verhoeven to thank for it. The Dutch director will long be remembered for bringing Sharon Stone's sliver to the silver screen in Basic Instinct (the actress displayed her appreciation by giving him her panties as a keepsake). Noting that his signature camera angle has suddenly become trendy, he jokes, "I should ask for a percentage! I just saw that movie Babel where the Japanese girl [flashes her crotch]. And then there's Britney Spears. There are a lot of women who go around without panties these days. You must have noticed that. To your amazement sometimes."

"There are a lot of women who go around without panties these days. You must have noticed that. To your amazement sometimes"Of course, strategically uncrossed legs are not all Paul Verhoeven is known for. In his 46 years as a director, he has brought mainstream attention to killer robots (Robocop), tri-breasted prostitutes (Total Recall), and lethal ice picks (Basic Instinct). In the early '90s, after Verhoeven and blustery wunderscribe Joe Eszterhas explored their baser instincts with Stone, they embarked on a big-budget passion project that would become one of the most legendary flops in Hollywood history.

"I liked Showgirls!" he says now. "I see it as a hyperbolic experience." Not a lot of viewers were seeking this particular sort of experience, though, and the splat the movie made when it landed in theaters still echoes in the American psyche. His next film, Starship Troopers, a sci-fi satire in which soldiers battle enormous insects, met a similar fate. "I always felt that the movie was, to a large degree, misunderstood," Verhoeven says with a sigh. It seems audiences took the film's fascistic worldview at face value. When it was released, Washington Post writer Stephen Hunter went so far as to call it "Nazi to the core." Rarely do movies about giant bugs elicit blurbs like that.

PIÈCE DE RÉSISTANCE Carice van Houten does her part for Holland

With such an oeuvre, what do you do for an encore? A Holocaust movie, natch. Black Book, a Dutch-language feature shot in Verhoeven's native Holland, tells the story of a Jewish woman's attempts to survive the final days of World War II after her hiding place is bombed by Allied forces. And despite its period setting and deadly serious subject matter, it's a Verhoeven flick to the core. Along with his favored touchstones—full-frontal nudity (both flavors, in extended Jew-on-Nazi sex scenes), brain-splattering executions, torture, and enough moral ambiguity to make Henry Kissinger blush—the director treats the audience to the unprecedented image of a waterfall of shit poured over heroine Rachel's half-naked body. Life Is Beautiful, this is not.
Photos: Catherine Ledner; Sony Picture Classics