Before Sharon Stone hit big with Basic Instinct, she made Scissors - another thriller than gave her what was easily her best role at that time. In it, Stone plays a repressed 26 year old virgin who repairs broken dolls and sees a psychiatrist (Ronny Cox) who keeps trying to free her of her repressed childhood memories. Things take a bizarre turn when she's attacked in the elevator by a red headed man with a beard and she stabs him with a pair of scissors. He leaves, but not before taking her purse and keys. She begins living in fear that, one day, he'll return and finish the job.

Enter a kindly actor neighbor and his invalid creep of a brother who both take a liking to our heroine as her mental stability takes a turn. She's eventually called on to interview for a job at a fancy new loft and ends up locked in, further complicating her already fragile mental state.

There's a lot going on in Scissors and most of it doesn't need to be there. The entire subplot with the two brothers could have been dropped completely since the payoff isn't interesting enough to warrant its inclusion in the first place. Stone is good, especially when she finally starts losing her mind. The final twist is far fetched, but does make some sense in the grand scheme of things. It's just a shame that the movie spends so much time on characters and subplots that feel like they're from a different film entirely.

Angie Anderson (Sharon Stone) gets attacked by a masked man in her apartment elevator. She stabs him with her scissors but he promises to return. She is helped by her neighbors identical twins Alex and Cole Morgan (Steve Railsback). She collects dolls and makes clothes. Psychiatrist Dr. Stephan Carter (Ronny Cox) treats her. She's 26 and sexually frigid. She becomes beset by paranoia and fear. Ann (Michelle Phillips) is the doctor's wife.

The music, the acting and the story is all trying to make an old overwrought sexual-psycho thriller horror. Sharon Stone is playing against type especially considering her later roles. She never fit this shy scared girl even when she was younger. It's really problematic. She is forced to overact. There is no good acting in this by anyone. The music gets kind of annoying which makes the horror thriller not scary at all. There are some weird nightmarish turns. However it comes off laughable to me. It's like the movie takes a detour into the Twilight Zone.

Sharon Stone is a sick girl, scurrying from junk store homewards to her luxury building apartment in New York, where she fights off a recurring rapist in the elevator. Neighbor Steve Railsback plays her wheelchair-bound neighbor and his own twin actor,. Her psychiatrist, Ronny Cox works hard during their sessions, although his wife, Michelle Phillips, who is running for mayor, keeps phoning to say she won't be home.

Miss Stone goes to the sixth-floor office of a developer -- why? The director moved the camera -- where she finds him stabbed to death, and her trapped there because the door handles are disconnected and everything is bolted to the floor. Meanwhile, telegrams go to Railsback and Cox saying she's gone to Oklahoma. Railsback doesn't believe it because her cat is crying.

Anyway, that's the set-up, and besides the cinematic pleasure of watching Miss Stone being tormented -- if that's your idea of a good time -- there's the question of who is doing this and why. That's the mystery component to this movie, to give it an actual plot. Unfortunately for my taste, writer-director Frank De Felitta concentrates so much on the second-hand imagery, from Poe to cheap reproduction furniture, to the good-bad-twin bit, that the structure doesn't matter in this watered-down, almost blodless Grand Guignol.