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LOS ANGELES - Will it be a worthy successor to the pulp femme fatale hit? Or will it just be "Basic Instink?" Shooting begins in April on "Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction," Sharon Stone's long-delayed followup to the 1992 sex thriller in which she played a brazenly manipulative 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 (news)' 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.

Fourteen years is a long gap between a hit movie and a sequel. The followup 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.

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 sits 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' 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.

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