With two corpses in his cellar, a wife who prefers the chauffeur to her husband, a jail stint in his recent past, and a tattoo he can't remember getting, Ryan O'Neal has a lot of catching up to do when he reunites with cancer-stricken dad Lawrence Tierney. Fortunately, Tierney allows no room for self-pity in his quick analysis of his son's situation: "Certain dames oughta wear a T-shirt that says, 'Hang around, I'll make a cocksucker out of ya.'" Such clearheaded assessments serve O'Neal well as he goes about reconstructing the past few days, pinpointing the beginning of his problems as a casual cocktail gathering with vacationing couple Frances Fisher and R. Patrick Sullivan. "I made many notable films," Fisher informs her new acquaintance. "I made X-rated films--triple-X-rated." Her comment prompts O'Neal to inform Sullivan, "I could fuck your woman in front of you." After making good on that promise, O'Neal wakes up unable to remember much else about the previous night. Soon, ex-Green Beret police chief Wings Hauser has him running scared by advising him to check a backwoods drug stash that now contains a severed head. That's a preview of the naked corpses soon to parade through his life, and the cue for yet another flashback, this one involving ex-girlfriend Isabella Rossellini. Regretting the dissolution of their relationship, he recalls an "outlet weekend" with a "young, white, Christian couple" (met through the personals section of Screw magazine) that inexplicably failed to solidify their bond despite allowing them access to "the biggest prick in Christendom." After reminiscing, O'Neal discovers that Rossellini has married Hauser, that Hauser is carrying on with O'Neal's wife (Debra Sandlund), and that all are somehow tied up with Sullivan, Fisher, Sandlund's ex-husband John Bedford Lloyd, and an enormous amount of cocaine. Tough guys don't dance, but they also apparently don't know how to reply when an ex-girlfriend proposes killing her husband. O'Neal responds by exclaiming, "Oh, man. Oh, god. Oh, man. Oh, god. Oh, man. Oh, god. Oh, man. Oh, god. Oh, man. Oh, god." (Lines like that one, and Fisher's statement, "My pussy hair was bright gold in high school, until I went out and scorched it with the football team," provide ample evidence of why writer-director Norman Mailer was once considered the future of American literature.) How to solve such problems? Father knows best. "I say we deep-six the heads," Tierney suggests. So they do, to the musical accompaniment of "Pomp And Circumstance."
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