A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : OVERSEAS BOX OFFICE : South Africans Fall Bigtime for the Uncut ‘Basic Instinct.’ (We’re Not Surprised.)

No one could say that the strict Calvinist folks of South Africa weren’t warned about their latest American import, “Basic Instinct.”

Long before the film arrived, the papers said it was sexually explicit, violent, probably sexist and possibly misogynistic.

But, then again, maybe that’s why the thriller already has cracked nearly every box-office record in South Africa in just three weeks. And, sometime soon, probably later this month, “Basic Instinct” will become the highest-grossing movie in the country’s history.

“Basic Instinct,” which has taken in $112.5 million in the United States and Canada so far, began its run in South Africa by setting a record for its opening weekend and its first week, collecting 1.8 million rand, or about $660,000, on 48 screens nationwide. Over the first three weeks, the film has been seen by 650,000 South Africans and grossed about $2 million.

At this rate, it will soon surpass the current box-office champion, “Pretty Woman,” which collected $2.8 million in its six-month run.

The film, starring Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, was ushered into the country with a minimum of controversy. The Publications Appeals Board, a relatively liberal group of government censors, approved the movie without cuts, though it restricted admission to viewers 21 and older.

The local distributor, Ster-Kinekor, worried that the age restriction might hurt the film, especially in a country where 14-to-24-year-olds account for 65% of ticket sales. And Ster-Kinekor executives also thought the film’s explicit nature might turn off strait-laced South African audiences. At best, they figured, the film might collect $1 million at the box office, which would nevertheless make it a very profitable run by South African standards.

But they were wrong. “It’s done phenomenal business--way beyond our expectations,” said Grant Bushby, publicity manager for Ster-Kinekor.

And Bushby said the numbers suggest that the relatively small moviegoing population, which is predominantly white, is seeing “Basic Instinct” two and three times.

The success of “Basic Instinct,” in a country where magazines still are banned for showing topless women and censors snip away at the dialogue in “L.A. Law” and other American TV series, has been something of a mystery. “People have been surprised because they actually enjoyed the movie. It’s a good thriller,” Bushby said.

Another reason, Bushby says, may be the general absence of sexually explicit films and magazines in South Africa. “South Africans are starved for sex,” Bushby said. “It’s not like in the States, where you can go into the corner porno house or rent a blue movie. In South Africa, you have to look at smuggled-in blue movies.”

South African whites once made up one of the most strict societies in Africa. About half of the 5 million whites are Afrikaners, descendants of the 17th-Century white settlers who came to Africa to escape liberalizing moves in European churches. And, for years, the Afrikaners were able to control the cultural development of South Africa.

But that has been changing, nudged along by the demise of the legal system of racial segregation known as apartheid. Others trace it to the advent of television in South Africa in the late 1970s and the American TV shows shown here.

Whatever the reason, South Africa has loosened its cultural restrictions greatly in recent years, ignoring the objections of some whites and allowing most American movies to be shown here without cuts. (In the booming video industry, though, movies still are sharply censored.)

Last month, only two weeks before “Basic Instinct” opened, the South African Parliament for the first time allowed cities to show movies on Sundays. Every major city in the country immediately passed laws allowing cinemas to open on the traditional day of worship.

Although some South Africans are not pleased, they seem to have given in to the liberal tide. Not one viewer has complained about “Basic Instinct,” Ster-Kinekor says. And the continuing demand for tickets has forced the distributor to push back new film opening dates to keep the movie in the country’s biggest houses.