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.
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.