Had sex, lies and videotape been staged as a screwball comedy, it might have looked something like Rocky Collins' Pants On Fire, a savagely funny critique of modern marriage that spins off into amusing complications yet remains firmly rooted in the everyday. Expanding from a simple, perfectly realistic premise—two grade-school teachers, Christy Baron and Neil Maffin, have an adulterous affair that wrecks both their marriages—its most observant comic moments are cloaked in banality. In one scene, Maffin is hastily packing a suitcase after his wife (Karen Young) kicks him out of the house. While she tearfully berates him for his devastating betrayal, he separates out some dirty clothes and tosses them in the laundry hamper for her to wash, a gesture through force of habit which, at that moment, seems outrageously callous. In another, Baron's husband Harry O'Reilly, forced to sit alone in the kitchen while she carries on an agonizing 20-minute conversation with her lover, passes the time by working on the Sunday crossword. Though Collins has plenty to say about an adult world in which honesty is a matter of convenience and marital vows are a joke, these small domestic details lend his satire the chill of authenticity. They also serve to flesh out characters who might otherwise seem too schematic: Young, often described as "the nicest woman in the world," endlessly accommodates both her husband and her lover, which only makes her more destructive; O'Reilly, a lawyer running for district attorney, treats their marriage like a breached contract, all the while hiding a recent tryst with his secretary. Juggling three sharply realized characters incapable of telling the truth unless it suits them, Collins builds on their constant deception until the melodrama reaches such a fever pitch that it crosses over into comedy. Eventually, the lifelong bonds of matrimony fray into short-term pacts that become increasingly desperate and meaningless, reaching a hilarious nadir when Maffin agrees to sign a "Non-Interference Of Marriage Contract." An accomplished and auspicious debut, Pants On Fire languished without a distributor for three years, presumably because it's a little off-balance and rough around the edges. But, just like sex, lies and videotape, those homemade qualities make it surprising and effective.