SPETTERS

SPETTERS, 1980
Netherlands | DVD, Color, 120’ | Dutch
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Hans van Tongeren, Renée Soutendijk, Toon Agterberg, M. Spanjer

Called “deviant”, “misogynist”, “blasphemous”, and “decadent” (among other things) when it was released, Paul Verhoeven’s fifth feature film Spetters (“Spatters”) provoked so much ire that the director ended up leaving the Netherlands for a career in Hollywood. With the hindsight of nearly a quarter of a century we can easily see in Spetters the essentials of Showgirls, the film that Verhoeven made in Hollywood in 1995. Violent and sexually explicit, Spetters is a high-speed coming of age story about three young men dreaming of an escape from their provincial surroundings by means of a career in racing.