Madeline Ashton and Helen Sharp have spent their entire lives trying to one-up each other, usually with Madeline winning. After Helen's fiance, Dr. Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis, the real star of the film) is stolen by Madeline, Helen retreats into a debt-ridden life as a Madeline-obsessed fatty who drives her fellow mental institution patients even crazier. But back to her later. Years later Madeline’s charming idiosyncracies have reduced Dr. Menville, a once-brilliant plastic surgeon, into a boozy mortician who brags to a horrified mourner about using spray paint to get those perfect skin tones. Madeline and Helen are cattily reunited at a booksigning party - Helen’s - who now looks like 3 times her signing bonus. The book: Beauty secrets for older women. Her secret? Again, later.  Helen browbeats the now spineless Ernest into conspiring to murder Madeline. The plan is perfect. The problem is that Madeline, driven over the edge by Helen’s newfound beauty, has already taken the advice of her regular beautician and visited Isabella Rossellini’s mysterious beauty expert. The treatment? A potion that freezes age in its tracks and forces it into retreat. Her only warning is the seemingly innocuous advice to "take care of (her)self."

Back at Menville Manor, Ernest psyches himself up to carry out the murder - by poisoning Madeline - except that an argument leads to her being pushed down the stairs, severely breaking her neck. Oh, well, dead is dead. Oh, but then the movie would be over. Madeline struggles back onto her feet and stumbles around the house in her best impression of Regan from The Exorcist. She’s dead - for real - but refuses to stop moving. A manic trip to the emergency room later, Ernest decides to apply his mortician skills to Madeline and at least maintain the appearance of being alive. Helen arrives, determined to help Ernest dispose of the body, except that there is no body. Madeline asks Helen to leave with a point-blank range blast to the belly with a shotgun. Helen’s got a huge hole in her stomach now, and boy, is she pissed about it. Oh, so that's her secret to looking great. She'd been to Rossellini, too! The two whack at each other with shovels and other blunt instruments while Ernest gives up and trudges upstairs to pack. Unfortunately for him, Helen and Madeline have come to a twisted truce of sorts, since Ernest is the only one with the skill to keep their bodies at least looking alive. They even conspire to make Ernest their permanent physician by forcing him to take the potion.  Ernest turns down Rossellini's generous offer, to everyone's surprise. Willis is brilliant in this scene. Live forever... but then what? Hang around with people like Helen and Madeline forever? Better to die. Helen and Madeline fail in their mission to drag Ernest back to their world, and Ernest escapes the Living Dead.

Years later, two veiled old hags sit at the back of Ernest's funeral. It turns out that, for him, life did begin at 50. He married another sweetheart, had kids, and they had kids and they had kids and they had kids... well, anyway, Ernest achieved his own immortality that way. The two hags cackle all the way out of the church. Alas, Helen and Madeline have not taken good care of themselves over the years. Without Ernest to patch up their cold, dead bodies, they've made a real mess of things.

Again, I choose not to see this as a diatribe against all women, but just these two. To go deeper, a poke at Hollywood's obsession with immortality. Ms. Rossellini has a lot of famous clients, it turns out, hee hee. Now that I think of it, this is the only comedy I know of that Meryl Streep has been in. But then, I'm no fan of hers. Hey, if she did more scifi/fantasy/comedy movies, then we'd be better pals.