Pacific Heights (1990)

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It's a rare event when I give up on a movie before it is halfway through. Usually I will suffer through a fairly bad movie to see if any redeeming entertainment surfaces. I'd heard "Pacific Heights" was a good movie, but the premise was so absurd I turned it off after about 30 minutes. The notion that a landlord would hand over a signed copy of a lease to a tenant before having received the security deposit and first month's rent was ridiculous (which was not in fact depicted in the movie but required for all subsequent events) , but in principle I could suspend disbelief and accept that some inexperienced landlords might be such complete idiots. However, the idea that the San Francisco Police would side with the illegal "tenant" rather than with the "landlord," when the former had never paid any rent or security deposit--and changed the door locks--could only have been written by someone who has no concept of landlord-tenant relations in America. Not only would the SFPD have immediately evicted the interloper, they would have arrested and jailed him for trespassing on the landlord's property. The scene of the police telling the landlord he should get a lawyer was especially ludicrous; the only person that would have needed a lawyer was the pretend "tenant." I don't care how skillfully the direction was after that or how suspenseful the movie would becaoe; because it was clear from that moment on the movie would be a right-wing fantasy about the potential danger of "tenants' rights." The reality is that the justice system totally supports landlords against tenants who, for whatever reason, have not paid their rent. Don't waste your time on propaganda that implies otherwise.

I was looking forward to Michael Keaton playing the heavy, but "Pacific Heights" is the wrong vehicle for that. He's playing the tenant from Hell, terrorizing couple-of-the-year Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine, but I can only describe this is a real estate thriller - which is just as exciting as it sounds. Keaton goes from mustache-twirling to psychological manipulator, but the writing doesn't offer much to go on. His motivations are specious, while Modine's mood swings leave Griffith as the only character to root for. That's no secret, and it's why she's the one to get revenge.It's not terrible, but I did get frustrated with these characters far more than anyone should.5/10

This is a thriller. It isn't the best thriller of all time, though there are thrills. If you need lots of thrills, perhaps this isn't your movie. There are other things at work though, things other than thrills. There's anger. This movie will anger you. Infuriate you. It did me. The suffering of Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine at the hands of Michael Keaton is infuriating, in as much as they cannot do anything about it. Keaton plays a bad man: Carter Hayes. He rents a room in a gorgeous Victorian house in San Francisco's - you guessed it - Pacific Heights neighborhood. Drake Goodman and Patty Palmer - Modine and Griffith, respectively - are living in sin, and renting out the room to Hayes. But Hayes never pays the rent and never leaves. It gets worse from there. It's kind of a cautionary tale for Renters. Most reviewers have called out Griffith and Modine's characters as being yuppies - I just see them as a normal middle-class couple. Not much yuppie-ish about them. Maybe I don't really know what a yuppie is. Doesn't seem generous to call them yuppies, though. And here, they are victims. I like Michael Keaton, though he's not on screen all that much, really. There's some convoluted back story to his character, though it's hard to understand why he's really as bad as he is. No matter. Michael Keaton is the best part of this movie. Matthew Modine is okay. He's kind of a chump. You kind of get the feeling like he partially deserves what is happening to him. Partially. And then there's Melanie Griffith. She's okay in it, too. She's the heart of the movie, really. The movie doesn't really suggest anything about who the characters really are or why they make the choices that they do. The movie is really all about the situation that they are in - and as I said, the situation is a bad one. It may be that the movie is trying to say something about the rights of property owners in this country, or the lack-thereof. But it doesn't explore that enough. Overall, it's a good little movie, and I recommend watching it, especially if you like Keaton. I like Keaton. I'm glad I watched.

This 1990 film about new landlords doing battle with the tenant from hell could have been a good psychological thriller; sadly, an interesting idea was hampered by poor execution. The film certainly did well at the box office and Schlesinger makes good use of the locations in San Francisco and Palm Springs; that said, the characters are so underdeveloped that it's difficult to care about what happens to them. As far as the look of the film is concerned the budget's been used well; would that one could say the same for the content.Drake (Modine) and Patty (Griffith) are young, un-married and upwardly mobile. They move into a Victorian house in San Francisco which they plan to renovate. The payments are beyond their means but the property's been divided into three apartments so by combining their savings with rent from the other two apartments, Drake and Patty decide that they can manage.Before long one of the apartments is occupied by the Watanabes (a kindly Japanese/American couple) but Drake and Patty haven't been entirely truthful about their financial position and in order to make the monthly payments on the house they need another tenant as quickly as possible.Enter Carter Hayes (Keaton).Hayes is expensively dressed, drives a very expensive car and is very polite; the answer to Drake and Patty's prayers. Admittedly for someone so apparently wealthy he's strangely reluctant to undergo a credit check but so what? Needs must when you are up to your eyes in debt; besides, he may be polite to the point of creepiness but he's got references, he's come along at just the right time and in return for waiving the credit check he's willing to pay six month's rent up front by wire transfer; what could be better?Now, there's an old saying about what happens when someone or something seems too good to be true.Yes, that's the one.Sure enough, Hayes is a nightmare; he moves in without permission, bringing a slack-jawed weirdo with him (together they carry out unauthorized do-it-yourself work on the apartment until the small hours of the morning), the promised rent shows no sign of appearing and the noise (plus an army of cockroaches) forces the Watanabes to move out.Hayes, however, has absolutely no intention of doing likewise; from the moment he moves in on Drake and Patty, he's waging psychological warfare. He won't even answer the door to the apartment and goes so far as to change the locks. He also knows how to play the legal system to his advantage and when Drake cuts off the power, he calls the police and it's Drake who finds himself on the wrong side of the law.This pattern is repeated throughout the film and is, as it turns out, Hayes' usual modus operandi: move into rented accommodation, refuse to pay the rent, make a nuisance of himself, push the landlord over the edge and then play the victim, continuing this pattern until a happy household has been destroyed.There is, to begin with at least, an air of mystery about Hayes; what does he do apart from unauthorized building work? Is he, perhaps, a satanist? A serial killer? Both?No.Hayes, we discover, is a loser, serial wrongdoer and general ne'er-do-well who is unhappy because he's been disowned by his family so in his mind, nobody else should be happy either.That's it.Michael Keaton plays creepy-and-slightly-menacing like nobody else but for him to be scary the menace needs to come to the fore and that simply never happens. Even when he's seen sitting in the dark twirling razor blades, we don't get the feeling that he's going to do anything with them: at least, not to anybody other than himself. He comes across as more pathetic than anything else.Without going into too much detail from here on, Hayes is not above a spot of identity theft; having already assumed the identity of the property's former landlord (Hayes' real name is James Danforth), he pretends to be Drake in order to use his credit cards; however he is soon found out by Patty and all Drake has to do to stop him is freeze the joint account. With that done, Danforth's 'scam' unravels and it's downhill for him from then on.I won't give away the ending but it is a happy one, should you be curious enough to watch this interesting misfire of a film.4 out of ten.