Ouch! It's still insanely bad, naturally, but the keyword there is "insanely". It's not a conventional bad movie, since technically it's proficient and even visually attractive at times, and the badness mostly arises from an unconvenionally bad script and an entertaining variety of terrible performances.
Basically, it's an extremely banal plot (Miami Vice-level drug shenanigans) that Mailer has tried to titivate in a ludicrous number of ways, by adding a barrowful of neo-noir tropes; an equal number of lurid family melodrama ones; rather bland kinky sex elements; and - the piece de resistance - absurdly purple dialogue.
The performances are all over the place. Ryan O'Neal, as stilted as ever, actually fares better than some of the others, who seem to be acting in a different film entirely (or wish they were), or phoning in a villain-of-the-week cameo on a lame 80s detective show. Wings Hauser has no idea what approach to take with his absurd character - and who can blame him? - so he tries all of them, and even gets to draw on the most ridiculous lesson from some long-ago acting workshop in his final scene. But the prize stinker is Debra Sandlund (who? indeed): when she's done with the film's sets, she threatens to crawl out of the screen and start chomping on your furniture.
Although it was still a bit of a chore to get through the whole thing, watching it has inspired an acceptable number of running jokes in the household, so I think we're even. I'll spoiler these, not because you'll care anything about the plot, but because I don't want to mar your potential merriment when they unfold before you like a car accident:
"Oh God. Oh Man. Oh God. Oh Man. Oh God. Oh Man." Useful for any tiny crisis (e.g. running out of milk).
Oddly enough, the most quoted line hereabouts turns out to be the following, delivered in a stroke-slurred voice from the side of the mouth: "You have no womb." That one even got a slightly unfortunate airing during Prometheus.