Product Description

Grammy® and Golden Globe® winner Madonna stars with Oscar® nominees* Willem Dafoe, Anne Archer and Julianne Moore in this "bold, shocking and titillating" ("Entertainment Tonight Radio") erotic thriller. Rebecca Carlson (Madonna) is a powerful woman. Intelligent, successful and breathtakingly beautiful, she can bring almost any man to his knees. And that's exactly where she wants them. But when a night of sexual abandon ends in the death of a prominent businessman, Rebecca finds herself on trial for murder. Now it's up to her attorney (Dafoe) to proveher innocence...but when he becomes entangled in her web of erotic game-playing, his body of evidence begins to contain as many curves as his client. *Dafoe: Supporting Actor, Shadow of the Vampire (2000); Platoon (1986); Archer: Supporting Actress, Fatal Attraction (1987); Moore: Actress, The End of the Affair (1999); Supporting Actress, Boogie Nights (1997); Supporting Actress, The Hours (2002); Actress, Far From Heaven (2002)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9988 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-12-03
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

Amazon.com
Madonna isn't merely the prime suspect in the scandalous murder of a millionaire with kinky appetites; she's the murder weapon itself in this erotic thriller in the Basic Instinct mode. The art gallery owner by day and icy-blond dominatrix by night is accused of, shall we say, "loving" her victim to death, and Willem Dafoe is the happily married lawyer she lures into the dark thrills of pleasure and pain. The actual mystery is perfunctory at best and the absurd courtroom theatrics a mere formality in a film far more fascinated with sweaty sex, hot wax, and broken glass. Madonna isn't shy about her body and seems to enjoy the games her character plays, but she's no Sharon Stone; there's no danger smoldering behind her seduction. Like her notorious book Sex, this is a handsomely shot work of pure exhibitionism. --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker
Madonna plays a woman on trial for deliberately inducing a fatal coronary in her wealthy older lover by means of overstrenuous sadomasochistic sex. Aside from morons, the only viewers likely to be thrilled by this star vehicle are her academic fans: they gaze avidly, deconstructing her with their eyes. For them, the turn-on might be the question: In the light of Sharon Stone's brilliant appropriation of Madonna's persona in "Basic Instinct," is Madonna still the author of Madonna? To the layman, the answer to that one is obvious. Stone's "Madonna" is so much wittier and sexier than its model that it obliterates the original: it turns the "real" Madonna into an immaterial girl. Madonna-the hardest-working sex symbol in the history of show business-tries with her customary dogged application to reclaim her creation, but it's no use. She seems to be taking herself too seriously, and her erotic audacity lacks even the illusion of playfulness. Her performance feels strained and heavy-spirited; watching it is like watching Joan Crawford tap-dance. Also with Willem Dafoe, Anne Archer, Joe Mantegna, and Julianne Moore. The ridiculous screenplay is credited to Brad Mirman; the sluggish direction is by Uli Edel. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Basic Instinct that stinks
This film seems to be a divorce gift from Madonna to Sean Penn. After hot tempered fits of bondage and domination fueled by alcohol split their msrriage up, she still claimed to love him. Madonna monotones her lines as she strips to keep us guessing, Did she do the murder or not? William Dafoe snarls, grimmaces and shouts as her attorney seduced by her devious games, at times resembling Talman's Hamilton Berger on Perry Mason. If anyone should divorce a cruel partner they should have him or her sentenced to a prison where this is the only film to watch. Like Basic Instinct, but it really stinks and is one of the worst films ever made.

MATERIAL GIRL MURDERS FILM CAREER - NO SURVIVORS!
"I'm hard to resist," claims wanton art gallery owner Madonna in her 1993 flick Body of Evidence. We beg to differ. Resistibility is Madonna's salient quality as a film star.

The plot of Body of Evidence, the most enjoyably awful of Madonna's awful movies, can be summed up in the words uttered by the pint-sized son of defense lawyer Willem Dafoe: "Can you really screw someone to death?" Yes, that's the very question the entire story of Body of Evidence revolves around. Madonna has been accused of murdering her fiance, an older man whose death by cocaine, handcuffs and rough sex came right after he made her the sole beneficiary of his $8 million estate. Going right to work in his job of defending Madonna, lawyer Dafoe scoffs at investigating cop Joe Mantegna: "What are you going to do, tag her body as a murder weapon? It's not a crime to be a great lay." Well, it may not be a crime to be a great lay, but if you're Madonna it is a crime to try to play one. Striving for the effortless, incendiary va-voom of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Kim Novak in Vertigo or Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, Madonna comes off not as a blonde bombshell but a blonde bomb.

When Dafoe tells Madonna that Mantegna is going to build his case on her predilection for violent, dirty sex, Madonna replies, "It wasn't dirty! Have you ever seen animals make love? It's intense. It's violent. But they never really hurt each other." To which Dafoe replies, "We're not animals," whereupon Madonna counters, "Yes, we are." Well, some of us are. Soon, in the strangest come-on in movie history, a nude Madonna gets needles stuck into her behind by an acupuncturist while Dafoe watches, practically panting. In court, detective Mantegna presents his take on Madonna to the jury: "She is the murder weapon itself. When this trial is over, you will see her no differently than a gun or a knife or any other instrument used as a weapon." In short, an inanimate object. He does have that right. Prosecution witness Anne Archer, the secretary of the dead man, refers to Madonna as "a cokehead slut." Judge Lillian Lehman pipes up with one of our favorite Bad Movie lines ever: "I cannot change the titillating nature of this trial, but if I had wanted to work in the circus, I would have learned how to ride a trapeze!"

GREAT!!!
This movie is really good, and Madonna is fantastic in it! I highly recommend it!!