Paul Verhoeven is notorious for the pop-art/soft porn tilt of his Hollywood work, but this unique and perplexing classic from 1983 - Hollywood bound Verhoeven's last Dutch film - tops them all. Simultaneuously horriffic, sexy and hilarious, The 4th Man is an amazing film that has echoes of everything from Wild Strawberries to The Omen to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbe) is a heavy drinking writer living in Amsterdam with his twerpy, much younger, violinist boyfriend. Gerard becomes obsessed with a good looking straight guy at a railway station while en route to a seaside town to give a lecture to a local writing association. There, he encounters the mysterious Christine Halslag (Renee Soutendijk), the association treasurer who dresses in blood red or nothing at all, and who rarely steps out from behind her ever-whirring and oh-so phallic film camera. Gerard spends the night fucking an insatiable Christine, and in the morning is completely stunned to find out that she’s dating Herman (Thom Hoffman), the stud from the railway station. Much drama, most of it surreal, ensues when Christine summons Herman to meet a salivating Gerard.

But the story, fabulously soapy as it is, is virtually incidental. What makes The 4th Man so wonderful is the film's fabulous baroque millieu. Freudian dream sequences abound, with penises being severed by scissor-wielding femmes-fatales, freshly skinned livestock carcasses dripping blood into rose vases, and mysterious blonde virgins hanging around cemeteries, wielding gun/cock shaped keys that open cobwebbed tombs. Try and spot the difference between the dream sequences and the narrative proper as Verhoeven winks at Bergman, Bunuel and Hitchcock in scenes where Gerard encounters what his own funeral procession at the train station, or when Gerard visualises choking his effeminate younger lover with what looks like a black bra, or when Gerard arrives at a hill top mansion covered in shapeshifting neon signs, or when, etc..

Basic Instinct was this material with a Hollywood whitewash, replacing as it did Jeroen Krabbe’s omnisexual and totally unsympathetic Gerard with the ramrod straight Michael Douglas playing himself, and the alchemy of Renee Soutendijk’s Christine with the Mensa-intelligence of Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell. The loopy Showgirls, with its day-glo cinematography, animatronic characters, and comfortable union of MGM and HIV is a more loyal daughter of this film.

The actors are all great, including Dolf de Vries, who first appears as a forgettable small-town literary critic, then re-appears as the town’s head surgeon, who knows everyone’s secrets and isn’t at all backward in committing hysterical characters to the local mental institution.

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