Take the worst of the daytime and primetime sudsers, and roll them into one, and you've got "Masquerade", so silly and sordid and delightful that it has to be seen to be believed. Meg Tilly needed a more flowery, fragile name than Olivia, because she's so naive and gullible that her doctor should do a brain scan and then send her to a psychiatrist to see if she is actually mentally her physical age. She falls for the first handsome man who comes her way, and in this case, it's the gold digging Rob Lowe who appears to be in a scheme with her evil stepfather John Glover to steal her fortune and possibly kill her. Local cop Doug Savant is like her big brother and protector, warning her that Lowe's been fooling around with the easy and sleazy Kim Cattrall, and that's after an incident concerning a visit from the drunken step-dad who shouldn't even be there anyway because Tilly's mom is long dead. All she has for real family is aunt Maeve McGuire (irronically a veteran of practically every New York-based soap opera),but what she really needs is a legal guardian to erase all these hangers-on who seem to be living off the estate.

Having more twists and turns and bad plot within 90 minutes than "Dynasty" did in eight seasons, this is a car crash that not only goes over the cliff and explodes but sends a bunch of clowns rushing out from it afterwards. These characters for the most part are ridiculous cliches, and every twist gets more eye-rolling every time they occur. There are supposed fake murders, alleged attempts on her life, and she even adds her fingerprints to a weapon to make her seem guilty of a killing in self-defense. Everyone is playing their roles very seriously, but there seems to be at times a wink to the audience that they know what day are doing is ridiculous.

This came as the nighttime soap craze was winding down, and it's not quite even in the line of sexual thrillers like "Body Heat" and "Fatal Attraction" before and "Basic Instinct" and "Body of Evidence" afterwards. Glover wins quodos for his audaciousness, and Lowe gets a literally greasy scene as stark as the day he was born. The music by John Barry sounds like it was written for one of those lush Cinemascope 20th Century Fox movies from 30 years before. Never since "Peyton Place", "A Summer Place" and all those Ross Hunter places has there been something so deliciously melodramatic to laugh at, and with plenty of nudity thrown in and some pretty disgusting characters, it's a must-see for lovers of trashy cinema.

Money, mayhem, and sex. How can you go wrong? Meg Tilly, unglamorized, is a naive teen-aged graduate of a Catholic school. She makes her other-worldly way back to her REALLY dysfunctional, rambling mansion in Easthampton, where her villainous stepfather (John Glover, hammy but great!) is staggering around, usually three sheets to the wind, and entertaining his girl friend, Dana Delaney (Miss Briscoe, Lenny's sister-in-law). The script has given Tilly's mother the deep six before the movie starts.

Also present, the multi-talented Rob Lowe who, were he any worse an actor, could sink this vessel faster than a horde of mutant torpedo worms. As it is, he's a "superb captain", as someone calls him. His job seems to be skippering the racing sloops of very rich people so skillfully that they beat the racing sloops of other very rich people.

Lowe has assignations with the slutty Kim Cattrall, somebody else's wife. Very racy dialog. Lowe gives Cattrall a birthday present, a pair of skimpy black panties. Cattrall: "You want me to wear these?" Lowe: "I can't bite them off you if you don't." Avast there. Here comes a spoiler that may take the wind out of your sails. Lowe is not what he seems. Actually, he's in cahoots with Tilly's step-father and the town cop. The three of them decide that Meg Tilly's several hundreds of millions of dollars is too burdensome for one young woman, so they are going to have Lowe seduce her, marry her, and eliminate her -- in that order -- so that they can split up her assets three ways.

The plan goes awry. Lowe begins to feel affectionate towards Tilly, especially after they are as married as matched pelican hooks and she becomes pregnant. He shoots and kills Glover. Dana Delaney, Glover's squeeze, gets suspicious and is found hanging by a belt. The corrupt cop notices these little incidents and tries to blow up Tilly by tinkering with the gas line aboard her sloop, the Obsession. In a frantic attempt to save Tilly, Lowe is hoist by the cop's petard. In the cop's office, Tilly comes to grasp nature of the plan by an act of spiritually inspired intuition, just from glimpsing a photo of the three conspirators pinned to the cop's wall. (An old snapshot of three smiling men holding up a fish, and she twigs.) The cop attacks her with a marlinspike or something and tries to stove in her head. And he's a big, burly guy too. But those nuns turn out tough little babes and he can't do more than rip her shirt a bit before she propels him through the window to his death below.

John Williams' lush score practically swoons at the end as Tilly stands bravely alone, knowing that Lowe, though now in Davey Jones' locker, REALLY loved her. This ending prompts a question, though. She now has all those millions and that huge beachfront mansion to herself now, doesn't she? So what is her phone number? And does she like redheads?

Not much acting is really required in a piece like this. But John Glover is sublime as the villain. He always is. Rob Lowe, blandly handsome, like a department store mannequin, should be relieved of his watch and sent below. Meg Tilly is more complicated. She has a voice that's at once diminutive and husky. She seems to have been given a minimum of makeup, so her blemishes and pimples show on her pale face and shoulders. And that haircut! Blackbeard the Pirate looked more glamorous, even with the smoking gunpowder fuzes tied in his tresses. I suppose many eyes seem to tilt from inner canthus upward, but Tilly's are alarming. Her father was Chinese, and she herself has been a dancer and now an author, so she gets my vote.

Kim Cattrall is a snoot but has some of the best lines. "While you were plugging your stepfather, your husband was plugging me -- and he was great!" Well, it's not really a dirty movie though. Two scenes of Cattrall topless and one of simulated sex between Lowe and Tilly. Oh, and a shot of Lowe's buns, which reminded me that on a ship you should always spit to leeward.

There's another thing. I don't know if I should bother mentioning it because I'm not sure it's there, although there's a place for it in the plot. Still, I want to stay in the channel here. Red, right, returning, y'know. There's a bit of a homoerotic element in the relationship between Lowe and the conspiratorial cop. Lowe visits the cop at home. The cop is in bed and gets out to have a serious engagement with Lowe. He's all muscles, his head included, and he's wearing only a pair of skivvies, and when he threatens Lowe, he thrusts his face almost against Lowe's, takes Lowe's cheeks and squeezes them together so that Lowe's lips are pursed, and I'm thinking two more inches and this is a gay scene.

This romantic thriller isn't for everyone's tastes, I would guess, but I kind of enjoyed it, partly because I like the Hamptons and spent a lot of summers there as a youth. Well -- Sag Harbor, actually, in the modest house of some friends, acquired years before the area became uninhabitable for anyone except cosmetic surgeons, when the community was so compact and unprepossesing that, in a sandy wood just past the edge of town, you could sit and watch the foxes stare back at you, sometimes scratching their pointed black ears with their tiny and precise black paws. Red foxes. Auburn foxes. Unquestionably extinguished by development. Now we have this movie about people fighting over hundreds of millions of dollars, none of whom has had a selfless thought in their entire lives.

Tim Whalen (Rob Lowe) is a yachting stud having an affair with his boss's wife Brooke (Kim Cattrall). They live in the upscale town of Southampton, Long Island. Olivia Lawrence (Meg Tilly) is a young heiress after her mother's death. She returns home after college and gets involved with Tim. She is forced to live with her alcoholic gambling debt-ridden stepfather Tony Gateworth (John Glover),and his girlfriend Anne Briscoe (Dana Delany). On the surface, Tim and Tony don't get along but they actually have a scheme to kill Olivia. Tim starts to have cold feet but Tony threatens him. In the planned break-in, Tim kills Tony and Olivia insists on taking the blame as self-defense. Her love-lore friend Officer Mike McGill (Doug Savant) turns a blind eye to incriminating evidence.

It's a twisty murder scheme conspiracy. The movie suffers as one thinks about it too much. It's highly questionable why Tim does any of it. How could he ever guarantee he'd be paid in the original plan? I buy into Meg Tilly's cluelessness. She's probably the only one that makes sense. The various wills and legality need to be better explained. Also the schemes seem to be so many excuses to advance the plot. My biggest problem is that the movie tries too hard to overload the overwrought melodrama. It becomes too cloying and tiresome. And that music just won't stop.