Ghosts Can’t Do It 1989

Katie O’Dare Bo Derek is married to elderly billionaire Scott Anthony Quinn. Despite a 30-year age gap, their relationship is vibrant, adventurous, and filled with laughter, travel, and a deeply passionate sex life. They ride horses, chase nightlife, and revel in the energy of youth on loan to an older man. During a countryside horseback ride, Scott suffers a heart attack. He survives, but doctors warn that his heart condition will rob him of physical intimacy. Age and medical barriers prevent him from receiving a heart transplant, and facing a future without that intimacy, he chooses to die on his own terms. He commits suicide as a final act of control over his fate.

Ascending to the afterlife, Scott meets a fledgling guardian angel—a novice who is still learning how to guide souls. The angel, portrayed by Julie Newmar, is unsettled by the weight of her first assignment, and Scott uses that inexperience to persuade her to allow him a return to Earth not merely as a ghost, but as someone who can inhabit a living body later. He convinces her to let him come back for the sake of staying near Katie, the person who still grieves him most. Katie is the only one who can sense or hear Scott, a paradox that fuels both comfort and frustration as they navigate the limits of non-physical contact.

To make his plan work, Scott urges Katie to embrace a dangerous path: he wants her to kill so that he can possess the victim’s body. On the pretense of managing her late husband’s business affairs around the world, Katie uses her inheritance to travel the globe, seeking a vessel that would be sexually compatible with their bond. A sub-plot unfolds around a business negotiation with Donald Trump, illustrating the high-stakes, cosmopolitan setting in which the pair move. Scott encourages Katie to engage in sexual encounters with each potential body, using intimacy as a test to see if the body can sustain their shared connection.

Eventually the couple identifies a young, handsome petty criminal named Fausto Leo Damian as their target. Katie has sex with Fausto multiple times while silently weighing the moral cost of murder, but the more intimate they become, the harder it is for her to imagine ending his life. Scott grows increasingly impatient, pressuring Katie to proceed before she changes her mind or withdraws emotionally.

The planned turn comes during a snorkeling trip when Fausto becomes tangled in a fishing net and drowns. In an unforeseen twist, Scott cannot possess the dead Fausto, forcing Katie to revive him with CPR. Freed, the living Fausto becomes a vessel for Scott’s presence, and the story culminates in Katie marrying Fausto—the man now permanently inhabited by Scott—binding their fates in a complex, morally charged union that has them navigating life between the living and the spirit world.