There is something seriously wrong with the end of Sliver, and it's a problem that derives not just from the fact that, firstly, it was totally reshot after that arbiter of all true taste, The Bad Test Screening (now leaving, coincidentally, a screamingly bizarre line of dialogue free-floating elsewhere), and, secondly, it bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the climax of the novel upon which it purports to be based.

Sliver was veteran author Ira Levin's first novel since The Boys From Brazil in the mid-seventies, and a severe disappointment: badly plotted, underwritten, appalling characterisation, and one of the worst endings in contemporary thrillerdom. If comparisons with Levin's wonderfully jet-black comedy of Satanic manners Rosemary's Baby were invidious, then to contrast Noyce's 1993 effort to Polanski's brilliant 1968 movie version of the same are laughable.

Stone is Carly Norris, divorced publisher starting out a new life in a New York 'sliver' apartment building, a place populated with the dregs of high living -- Tom Berenger's burnt-out crime writer, Polly Walker's coke-sniffing English model, and Zeke (William Baldwin), spoilt rich kid who, it transpires, owns the building and has it wired for video. The sliver, inevitably, has recently been the scene of a string of mysterious deaths that could all be accidents -- or could just be something more.

They are, of course, something more, and the plot such as it is, conspires to drag Stone into an affair with Baldwin, and make her the virtual double of the woman who last lived in her apartment and was pushed from the balcony one night. Quite why Stone's character has to be the woman's double is just another of Sliver's unexplained 'depths': one of those kinks that shifts in and out of the action as the ludicrous Joe Esterhaus script tries (and fails) to get up any head of steam.

Esterhaus, of course, wrote the buttock-clenchingly awful Basic Instinct, and somehow inveigled his way to top money earning writer in Hollywood by essentially recycling the same tired plot over and over - Jagged Edge (where it was at least fresh), Betrayed, Basic Instinct. As a result, this film is less about Levin's farcical novel and everything about the scripter's own obsessions projected increasingly large. Sliver, like its predecessor, is an 'erotic thriller' -- cue several minutes of 'raunchy' sex between Baldwin and Stone that is as coy as the same scenes in Basic Instinct were gratuitous. But where at least that Stone-Douglas nonsense delivered on its cheesy promises, this film is almost as demure as The Sound of Music when it comes to its main selling point (witness: Stone masturbating in the bath with both hands above the water-line). This is an erotic thriller that is neither erotic nor thrilling.

The script brims over with hysterical, head-shaking lines -- Baldwin's ode to the joys of the volcano; Walker's description of something being worse than anal sex -- and the whole notion of voyeurism on such a mass scale is tossed away on film much as Levin does the same in the original novel. (One can only wonder what a writer-director like David Cronenberg could do with the same material). Stone proves here that shorn of the queen bitch ambiguities of Basic Instinct she really cannot act to save her life, but is easily beaten out of the truly awful category by William Baldwin's relentlessly absurd performance that should effectively nail his acting coffin shut for eternity.

The whole is marshalled on screen (just) by Phillip Noyce, who made one of the best Australian films of the seventies in Newsfront, and then proved his Hitchcock credentials with the top drawer Dead Calm only five years ago. On the evidence of this and last year's appalling Patriot Games, he forgot to pack his talent when he made the move to Hollywood. Ultimately, only Cronenberg's in-house composer Howard Shore makes any name for himself (when he's not being beaten into submission by a relentlessly crass 'credible' pop score), and the ever excellent Martin Landau at least has the dignity to disappear early in the action. Big, loud and obstinately dumb, Sliver is at least better than Basic Instinct, which really is not saying very much at all.