It’s been a few years since Paul Verhoeven’s WWII drama “Black Book,” a marked departure from the director’s usual fare of boobs and bullets. Over the past few months he’s been attached to a couple of projects, the Islam and psychic powers film “The Hidden Force” and the video game adaptation “The Last Express,” but it looks like his next will find him in very familiar territory.
Deadline reports that Verhoeven has signed to direct “Eternal,” a “Fatal Attraction”-with-ghost story. Start getting those Razzies ready. The film will follow a married recovering alcoholic who “helps a woman threatening to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. They end up in bed, and in a torrid sexual affair. When he gets home, he’s confronted by his wife and a private investigator, with photos spread across a table. He thinks he’s busted, but the photos that should have shown him in the clinches with his mistress instead show him alone, drinking alcohol. He initially questions his own sanity, but progressively figures out that this temptress is a ghost who is after his soul.” With a script by David Loughery (“Obsessed,” “Lakeview Terrace”) being rewritten by Richard D’Ovidio (“Exit Wounds,” “Thirteen Ghosts”) this has quality written all over it.
Production on the film isn’t set to begin until next summer, so Verhoeven has plenty of time to reconsider and change his mind.