PAUL VERHOEVEN'S thriller opens with a shot of a screen-sized spider devouring its helpless prey. The movie ends on the same picture. While the two hours in between are entertaining enough a witty and sometimes outrageous romance complete with homosexual obsession, witchcraft, and enough lurid fantasy to earn the picture an X. The Fourth Man is nonetheless predictable and studied, almost like a computer's wet dream.

Jerome Crabbe stars as the flamboyant gay novelist Gerard Reve, Flat broke. Reve is on his way to do a reading for a literary club in a small town called Flushing when, at the Amsterdam train station, he sights a nicely-built young fellow. After an effort to follow the man. Reve loses sight of him.

At the reading, Reve finds himself followed by a devastatingly poised, icy blonde with a film camera. When she propositions him. Reve accepts, just as coolly--because he has nothing better to do, or because he doesn't like hotels, the depth of his motivation is anyone's guess. The fling picks up momentum only when Gerard finds a picture of the young man he'd missed on the previous day on Christine's desk. The man, it turns out, is her long-distance lover Reve is elated: megalomania becomes monomania, as he schemes and manipulates Christine into inviting the lad for a visit to the beach house. The three-some's little idyll goes from sordid to ugly, however, as Reve begins to experience a series of fantasies that turn out to be real-life omens and supernatural warnings of all sorts.

AN EARLY SCENE, in which Reve has just left the club with Christine, alerts us--in case the spider hadn't--that something is amiss. Maneuvering her flashy little sports car with suicidal abandon. Christine spirits Reve through a metaphysical traffic jam of omens, from bloody accidents to a neon sign that spells "spider" in Dutch on the front of her house. Later that night, Reve finds himself tormented with particularly nasty castration dreams that feature Christine wielding a pair of scissors in her blue-painted claws. Lest we dismiss the scene as a chuckle at Reve's castration complex and gender anxiety, within the next few shots we're shown Christine, applying steel-blue nail polish and' gleefully waving a very real pair of scissors. When Reve looks at the beach, he sees a bloody, mutilated man emerging from the waves, taking a quiet walk, he is hit over the head by a dying seagull.

The stream of dreams and warnings builds to a sort of surreal slapstick that makes it difficult to see why Reve doesn't just get the hell out of Christine's beachhouse inferno. He is, infact, put in the position of playing straight man to all the outrageous "clues" the plot offers Krabbe's magnificent portrayal of a very un-straight obsession keeps the character from being an imbecile, even given the vacuous tackiness of Herman, Christine's lover and his object of lust. Herman turns out to be a German plumbing contractor who not only looks, but sounds, like a talking centerfold.

After the initial scenes, Christine's character becomes increasingly flat. We learn that she is a witch and a manic man-killer, and that's that. Aside from a few very sinister smiles, she gives little insight into her character--she could just as easily be portraying a determined computer operator.

A major problem lies in the construction of The Fourth Man. The movie follows a fairly straight narrative line from its beginning and the end, and the audience is wise to what is going on from the beginning, even if the characters pretend they're not. The end does not pull the carpet from underneath the watcher the way a Hitchcock conclusion would; rather, it adds the missing piece to a puzzle-picture we're already more than well familiar with.

The stream of omens and fantasies, while entertaining in itself, is too clearly just that. We're never left in doubt as to where Reve's psyche--however fevered--ends and reality begins, leading to a progression of events that is studied and deliberate; there are no tricks of perspective, no phantasmagory in Verhoeven's high-tech entertainment.