October 30, 1987 |  No one in his right mind would call Tough Guys Don't Dance a great movie, or even a very good one. In fact, there are whole stretches of this whacked-out film noir that are downright awful. As a director, author Norman Mailer is exuberantly eager to please. But he's laughably inept in fundamental ways that would embarrass the least talented of Hollywood hacks.

And yet, there is something perversely mesmerizing about the luridly overstated melodrama of Tough Guys, which Mailer has freely adapted from his own semi-hardboiled novel. Even when it's at its most atrocious – no, make that especially when it's at its most atrocious -- the film holds the same grotesque fascination as a messy quarrel at the restaurant table next to yours, or the drunken rowdiness of a normally dignified colleague. Often ferociously funny in spite of itself, and in spite of Mailer, Tough Guys is, quite simply, the damnedest thing you're likely to see all year.

Mailer dearly wants to shock us, to create some kind of surrealistic fever dream of B-movie conventions, pulp-fiction poetry and macho sexual swagger. He has described Tough Guys as lying ''somewhere in a no man's land between a murder mystery, a suspense tale, a film of horror -- and a comedy of manners.'' And he's not far off the mark. Tough Guys is not merely stylized: The film and the characters that populate it have no connection with life as we know it on this planet. Everything appears to operate in some bizarre parallel universe, where people thrive on paranoia instead of oxygen.

Sluttish blonde bombshells lick their lips, undulate their hips and thrust their abundant breasts at the camera like someone making a threat. A psychotic police chief takes a robust drag of a marijuana cigarette, then announces with schoolboy pride, ''I'm putting the suspect at ease.'' An effeminate businessman takes his beautiful companion to a quaint little restaurant, where the companion warns him: ''Darling, when an attractive man and woman go on a trip, fear of disenchantment is always lurking.'' Yes, it certainly is.

In the opening sequence, the spooked-out protagonist wakes from a troubled slumber, discovers his cancer-ravaged father is waiting in the kitchen downstairs, and immediately launches into a defense of his masculinity: ''Dad, you always worried I'd turn out queer. . . I did my three years in the slammer without bending over for anybody!” But his father, it should be noted, appears profoundly skeptical.

Ryan O'Neal, looking as though he hasn't had a good night's sleep in years, stars as Tim Madden, a boozy would-be writer caught in a web of intrigue, kinky sex and drug dealing in wintry Provincetown, Mass. Madden, who spent his ''three years in the slammer'' for a botched cocaine deal, fears he may have committed a murder or two during a drunken binge after being deserted by his rich and wicked wife. But Madden gets little sympathy from Dad (Lawrence Tierney), who is still steamed about his son's marrying such a castrating bimbo in the first place. ''Any guy who marries a rich dame,'' Dad snaps, ''deserves anything he gets!''

Flashbacks bleed into other flashbacks, then double back onto the father-and-son reunion, as Madden struggles to discover who placed two severed heads in his secret dope stash. But before he can break free of an elaborate murder frame, Madden must cope with his estranged, oversexed wife (Debra Sandlund), the pot-smoking police chief (Wings Hauser), an emotionally wounded ex-lover (Isabella Rossellini), and a smooth-talking, homicidally inclined college chum (John Bedford Lloyd) who used to be married to Madden's wife.

And as if sorting all that out weren't hard enough, Madden also must cope with some impossible pseudo-poetic dialogue. A sample line: ''She has been the purest addiction of my life! Pure love, pure hate, all squashed up together!'' Another sample, delivered in darkness before the opening credits: ''I keep saying to myself -- death is … a celebration.''

Dad, in contrast, is not given to such philosophical musings. Rather, he takes a prosaic, brutally direct approach to his son's problems: ''I say we deep-six the heads. You got an anchor?''

Sounds juicy, doesn't it? But, alas, Tough Guys never fully follows through on its promise of a giddy wallow in decadence and cheap thrills. And most of the blame must be placed on the shoulders of Mailer himself, who demonstrates time and again that he has learned little about film technique since the 1960s, when he dabbled in moviemaking with three semi-improvised, Andy Warhol-influenced psychodramas (Wild 90, Maidstone, Beyond the Law ).

Tough Guys betrays Mailer's dismaying ignorance of such niceties as pacing, dramatic structure and the art of making a credible transition from Point A to Point B. Never mind the bollixed-up continuity -- just look at the way he screws up a simple car accident, or the clumsy way he stages a fateful encounter between hero and villain in the town square. Here, as elsewhere, Norman Mailer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist, is a rank amateur as a filmmaker. Mailer insists Tough Guys is a put-on, but his clunky storytelling is something you laugh at, not with.
 
And poor Ryan O'Neal plays Madden with the wounded sincerity of an actor who wasn't let in on the joke. O'Neal gives a doggedly realistic performance, which, in this context, makes him look stiff and absurd. At one point, a murderous punk attacks Madden's pet dog -- just a few seconds, by the way, after Mailer first establishes that Madden actually owns a dog. O'Neal does his best to appear angry and menacing: ''Your knife . . . is in . . . my dog!'' But the worked-up emotion seems silly, especially when the punk responds with, ''Hey, I'm sorry, man! I got nothin' against your dog!''

As Madden's once and future lover, Isabella Rossellini is even sillier, sounding very much as though she received her lines only a few minutes before every take. She's quite funny, though, when she tries to deliver a sexual taunt: ''Mr. Regency and I make out five times a night -- that's why I call him Mr. Five.''

Some other members of the cast are better attuned to Mailer's lunacy. For example, John Bedford Lloyd camps it up like someone on leave from a late Tennessee Williams play, and enlivens some dull spots. (''There is such pleasure,'' he enthuses, ''in shooting people!'') Wings Hauser has a grinning good time as the potent Mr. Regency, the Provincetown police chief, a man who's heartily amused by his own villainy. He's a good match for Debra Sandlund as Madden's wife, a brazen voluptuary who snarls sweet nothings into the ears of credulous men. Together, they put one in mind of those well-endowed Aryans who get all hot and bothered in Russ Meyer's sex-fantasy films.

In the end, Tough Guys Don't Dance doesn't seem like a real movie at all. Rather, it's more like Norman Mailer's extended, illustrated lecture describing the audacious movie he would like to make, if only he knew how to, well, make movies. Mailer tries to go over the top here, but he repeatedly butts his head against his own limitations in an unfamiliar medium. Maybe he should have turned his screenplay over to another director. Come to think of it, maybe he should have played the lead role himself. Just think how hilarious it might be if Mailer, not Ryan O'Neal, were to admit, on screen, ''I'm not a good enough writer to delineate how I really feel.''