PACIFIC HEIGHTS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: So you think you want to be a landlord,
huh? PACIFIC HEIGHTS is your worst real estate
nightmare ... at least for two-thirds. Then it forgets what
it set out to do. Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4).
Law favors the tenant. Nobody likes to see people thrown out on the street where they have no place to go. It is generally assumed that the landlord if better off than the tenant, so in many states the law favors the tenant. This does not seem to be a very likely fact on which to base a film thriller. Most of us have heard horror stories about landlord/tenant relations with one side or the other doing monstrous things, but that sort of horror story is rarely made into a movie. It is much easier to make and sell a horror film about, say, a vampire, than it is to make one about rental relations though I somehow suspect there are more bad tenants in the world than there are vampires. In the past real estate horror has generally been mixed with comedy in films, as in the classic MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE and its recent pale shadow, THE MONEY PIT. So PACIFIC HEIGHTS gets points for some originality and even some clever plotting. Unfortunately, both seem to run out about two-thirds of the way into the film. Then the film starts showing us things we've seen before and finally falls into cliche. And contrived cliche at that.
Patty Palmer and Drake Goodman (played by Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine) are two young people starting out life together buying a house and renting out the first floor as apartments. Think of them as minnows. And as their new tenant they have attractive, persuasive Carter Hayes (played by Michael Keaton). Think of him as a shark. Carter does not just know his legal rights as a tenant; he understands how to use those rights in intelligent and creative ways to grind up and swallow his unsuspecting landlords. And all the while he is doing this grinding, the law is on his side and pulling for him.
Had this been a film about a monster whose powers were all granted him by the law, PACIFIC HEIGHTS could have been a terrific thriller that would have been making a powerful statement. Unfortunately, at some point someone decided that Carter Hayes would be more than a crooked tenant: he would also be a psychopath. It may be the first horror film about real estate law ever, but it is probably the second or third film with a psychotic villain this month. When the psychotic side of Hayes becomes more important than his legal savvy, PACIFIC HEIGHTS just falls apart. The screenplay is Daniel Pyne's first and is inspired by his own experience as a landlord. Presumably he had an axe to grind. Curiously, his screenplay starts faltering only when he stops grinding it. I give PACIFIC HEIGHTS a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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