Six long years after giving us the mediocre Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven is back. He has two films currently scheduled for release in 2006.

The first is Zwartboek, which is being filmed in Dutch. The title translates to Black Book in English. According to IMDB, this film is "the story of a German Jewish girl who narrowly survives the war in Holland. She joins the resistance to find out who betrayed her family after all of them were killed in an attempt to reach the liberated south."

The film is in post-production and is currently scheduled for a September '06 release in the Netherlands. I hope it gets a US release, whether subbed or dubbed.


The second film is called Beast of Bataan, and it is a drama about the war crimes trial of Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma, the Japanese officer responsible for the Bataan Death March during World War 2.

This movie hasn't even been cast yet, so it might not be out til 2007.


Verhoeven is one of my all-time favorite directors. He gave us three of the greatest movies ever: RoboCop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct. I also enjoy some of his earlier work, specifically Flesh & Blood and The Fourth Man, and Starship Troopers is also a guilty pleasure of mine. I am both psyched and disappointed by his return. On the one hand, these two projects both sound very good and they both show serious ambition. And while it would be nice to see Verhoeven potentially get an Oscar nod, part of me would largely prefer to see him do an action movie. There are a lot of shitty action directors around right now (Uwe Boll, Rob Cohen, Louis Leterrier) who lack Verhoeven's vision and penchant for violence. They also lack any sort of directorial ability could be construed as anything above "barely competent".