“Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction” attaches so many dire consequences to the act of sex you can’t help wondering if the film wasn’t secretly made by the Family Research Council. Every character who surrenders to the basic instincts ends up dead in some gruesome fashion or another. This film might well be the world’s most expensive and titillating abstinence program.

The notorious and sexy anti-heroine of the first “Basic Instinct,” Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), is still shagging soon to be deceased people while writing salacious novels about her conquests and demonstrating an uncanny ability to elude jail time. Since film detectives have such trouble putting her behind bars, perhaps her antagonist in “Basic Instinct 3: Viagra Dependent” should just tag her with a warning – “Beware all ye who enter” – and be done with it.

Actually, Catherine would seem to be easy enough for her victims to ward off. With a string of bodies following her wherever she goes, you might think word would get out – if you don’t want to die when she’s in town, don’t sleep with her.

But this is too much for Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey), the “brilliant” but “tough” psychologist brought in to keep Catherine in jail when she is accused of drugging and drowning an English soccer star she was sleeping with.

After she is cleared of the charges, Catherine appears at Dr. Glass’s office, asking for treatment. Supposedly a master of manipulation, Dr. Glass accepts this psycho sex fiend as his client – even though he mentions that she clearly has the motive to do him in. Slowly Dr.Glass uncovers the list of her conquests.And they all turn up brutally murdered.

This doesn’t stop him from fantasizing about her. Staring at her dust jacket photo while in bed with other women isn’t satisfying enough, so Dr. Glass decides to go for her. When Michael Douglas’s Detective Nick Cannon went after Catherine in the original, it seemed like a bad – if sexy – idea. Here, it just seems like another way to get Ms. Stone out of her scanty wardrobe.

As Dr. Glass gets close to bedding Catherine, it is increasingly difficult to resist the bad horror movie impulse of screaming out: “No! Don’t go in there!”

But he does. And otherwise, Ms. Stone wouldn’t be able to show off her gravity-defying physique. And she has been adamant about her character’s brazen sexuality: “I wanted her to be very masculine, like a man in a steam room, and I wanted the audience to have a moment where they realize she’s naked and then realize that she’s a 40-something woman and naked.”

But there’s not much that is masculine about Catherine Tramell. In fact, there’s not much that’s human about Ms. Stone in this film. Like a female “Terminator,” Catherine seems as if she was sent from the future, to destroy London with her crotch. And while she may be a sexy cyborg, the mind control she seems to use on the other characters does not extend to the audience.

That’s not to say Ms. Stone flails in the film. She came out of the original Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas vehicle “Basic Instinct” a star. Though this sequel has more in common with that pair’s “Showgirls,” Ms. Stone has fared far better than Elizabeth Berkley, who ended up a victim of her creators’ kitsch. Ms. Stone takes pleasure in her screen dominance – and her performance may well make this sequel a cult classic. When Catherine is interrogated for murdering her boyfriend, she enthusiastically declaims her innocence: “I’m traumatized. Who knows if I’ll ever come again?”

But Mr. Morrissey is less successful. While he has a certain sex appeal, and an English accent, his blandness – especially in contrast to Ms. Stone’s dominance – gives the film a straight-to-video feel.

The tagline of the film is “Everything interesting begins in the mind.” But the mind is the last part of the body the creators of “Basic Instinct 2” were using.

Though Dr. Glass is supposed to be intelligent, and his possible appointment to a prestigious chair is meant to underscore this, it’s difficult to pinpoint a single intelligent decision he makes in the movie, even with the unconvincing surprise ending tacked on.

And Catherine – whose intellect dominates everyone else in the film – seems to be a novelist with a very limited imagination. In the first “Basic Instinct,” she wrote a book with a startlingly realistic depiction of her parents’ death, stood accused of a crime that was portrayed in another novel, and used Mr. Douglas’s Detective Cannon for research for her next. Here, she apparently prefigured the death of her soccer-playing stud on paper, and seems to be putting together another novel based on her dealings with Dr. Glass. Maybe someone could end her spree by enrolling her in a fiction workshop.

mkeane@nysun.com