7/10
A Psychological Thriller For the Plutocrats
15 January 2024
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Warning: Spoilers
"Pacific Heights" is the perfect psychological thriller designed especially for those who are basking in money and wealth, along with your mortgage, finance, and just about anything to protect your investment when it comes to owning your own home. It's about a financially stable couple who move into a 19th century polychrome building located in the trendy Pacific Heights area in San Francisco, and serve as landlords in order to pay off the mortgage of their homes. The tenants consist of a loving Japanese couple (Mako and Nobu McCarthy) and a slick, debonair, but very suspicious Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton). Carter is truly a piece of work as like the the cockroaches he breeds, he freeloads off of them rent free, renovates the home even during late hours of the night and makes everybody's life in complete misery, even forcing the elderly Asian couple to leave at one point.

The thing about Carter is that he will latch onto this couple played by Melanie Griffith as Patty Palmer and Matthew Modine who stars as Drake Goodman just to be a creep and can play off of people like set pieces of a board game. Performance wise it is well acted even though the story is quite thin which gives lessons to aspiring landlords to choose your tennants wisely. They are a young couple who are living their dream lives of owning their own homes, while still tweeking it here and there in some areas. That is until Carter shows up at their doorstep and the nightmare goes on from there.

Carter has the same level of evil as the average slasher film villains, even though he's just incognito as an average slick, well-dressed business tycoon who takes advantage of anyone and manages to successfully get away with it. He acts as though Patty and Drake are nothing more like putty on his hands but they (as least Patty that is) knows that this creep is bad news. The soundtrack indicates that trouble is on the horizon for this couple, and the direction from John Schlesinger has the cameras running in a dizzying way that will truly make your heads spin.

Carter sernades himself as a well-adjusted successful business tycoon who takes great interest in the estate the minute he walk in promising six months of payment rent via wire transfer to make up for refusing to take a credit check. In reality he's a con artist who never gave a red cent to the couple, and locks himself into his apartment hammering at all hours of the night, while also placing cockroaches all over the building. When the couple tries to evict him, Carter goes full-blown psycho and takes his devilish ways to new heights. His mind games forces the couple to spiral in terms of relationship and financial stability. When they try to reach the authorties, they are in shock to realize that they are all on his side making him quite untouchable.

It appears that he has done it many times to other in the past. We also get word that his real name isn't Carter Hayes but James Danforth. He plays this scheme like a game for giggles and money. He cons gullible homeowners and blackmails these authoritative figures by paying them off to take his side.

Patty and Drake are the perfect guinea pigs for Carter to con. They need the money to pay off the estate and are desperate to bring tennants into their apartments without considering back checking on the history of who should move in. However, Patty, the smarter of the couple goes through great lengths to dig the dirt of who Carter really is. While Drake, who's short on brains, takes Cater in to prove that he is the one who's in charge (or so he thinks). Once he's proven wrong and finds himself house bound after a physical confrontation that leaves him wounded, he realizes he's goofed up really badly. Patty decides to play at his game, which drives him insane to the point he wants to kill them, only to end up dead by impalement by a broken water pipe.

The script by Daniel Pyne reflects on an experience he had with a freeloader who refused to leave their premises which cost him and his wife a lot of money. It gives the lesson of be careful who you rent your property to because even though they came out lucky, the same can't account to everyone.

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