The long-delayed <i>Basic Instinct 2</I> prepares to go before cameras (15290)

Will it be a worthy successor to the pulp femme fatale hit? Or will it be Basic Instink? Shooting begins in April on Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction, Sharon Stone's long-delayed follow-up to the 1992 sex thriller, in which she played a brazenly manipulative bisexual novelist suspected in an ice pick murder patterned after a killing in one of her books. The new movie has her character, Catherine Trammel, leaving behind San Francisco and moving to London, where she once again ends up on the wrong side of the law. A Scotland Yard criminal psychiatrist (David Morrissey) fixates on Catherine much the same way Michael Douglas's obsessed cop did in the first movie.

Basic Instinct 2 will be directed by Michael Caton-Jones, whose movies include the Bruce Willis thriller The Jackal and the 18th-century Scottish epic Rob Roy. The movie is expected to hit theaters in early 2006, making for an unusually long gap--14 years--between a hit movie and a sequel. The follow-up had been moving forward five years ago but fell apart, then became mired in a lawsuit Stone filed over money she claimed the producers owed her. They reached a settlement last year.

Controversial among gay activists in the early '90s, the original Basic Instinct was a guilty pleasure for audiences to the tune of $117 million in domestic grosses. The movie featured rampant sex and had a notoriously revealing shot of Stone as she sat for a police interrogation. Online buzz about the sequel has been mixed, with some fans sounding eager and others taking a mocking tone, including some jabs at the actress's age; Stone turns 47 in March. "She may or may not keep her legs crossed in the remake, as she is getting well past her sell-by date," wrote one movie buff on a Web forum. (AP)