SnoopyStyle Drake Goodman (Matthew Modine) and his girlfriend Patty Palmer (Melanie Griffith) are stretching their finances to the limit to buy a San Francisco house. They need to rent the two ground floor apartments to cover the mortgage. They rent one apartment to the nice Watanabes. The other one they rent to Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton). Carter seems to be well-off initially. Things turn quickly. Carter never pays rent. He causes problems. The law is on his side. The couple gets Stephanie MacDonald (Laurie Metcalf) as their lawyer.Matthew Modine is so angry and so unlikeable that it's hard to root for him. He keeps yelling at everybody and it happens very quickly after the first hurdle. Michael Keaton is a nice creepy villain. It's somewhat a horror. The problem is that it's not a fun horror. The thrills are derived from annoyance. It is very good at being an uncomfortable watch. It's actually a relief when Modine takes a backseat to Griffith. For what it is, this is expertly made.

Garrett Marsden 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.

AaronCapenBanner John Schlesinger directed this thriller that stars Mathew Modine & Melanie Griffith as Drake Goodman & Patty Palmer, a young couple who buy an old house in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco. They are trying to find tenants, and at first, Carter Hayes(played by Michael Keaton) seems ideal: seemingly wealthy, well-dressed, and well-spoken. Unfortunately, he turns out to be a cunning and cold-hearted con man who moves in but pays no rent, and proceeds to drive the other tenants out and take the house away from them legally through nefarious means. Just who is Carter, and how can he be stopped? Keaton is excellent, really making Hayes a true sociopath. Trouble is, the story gives no real explanation for his increasingly bizarre behavior, and as a consequence, it just misses, though it has its moments.

breakdownthatfilm-blogspot-com Along with multiple other stories in film, normal and happy couples just can't seem to cut a break with running into some of the most mentally unbalanced individuals. I pity these people; I really do. Look at The Mean Season (1985), Unlawful Entry (1992) or even The Cable Guy (1996). Each share something in common and that's the unstable intruder who doesn't care what he does or how he does it because their upbringing as a child or young adult was very screwed up.Pacific Heights (1990) is the story about a young couple who moved into this specific area and buy a large house to use as an apartment for other tenants. All goes well like they planned until they come in contact with a very slippery and shifty individual who ends up making their lives spiral downward. Odd as it is, I was able to predict what would happen in this kind of situation. I don't know if that's because the writer Daniel Pyne, could not write a more original plot. I say that because like the other films mentioned above, the antagonist relies on and abuses the rights he is given by law to evade the law. This makes the story very formulaic, but I do give credit for the third act because it went in a direction I did not expect.Playing the young spirited couple are Melanie Griffith as Patty Palmer and Matthew Modine as Drake Goodman. Together they permit the sly dog Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) into their home as a tenant. To be honest, I found Griffith and Modine to be good at playing an unknown couple but I also don't feel like they made their characters stand out enough either. That's because of how formulaic the screenplay was written. As for Keaton, no doubt does he make it look like he has the mental state of a sociopath. He was creepy but I think he could have been creepier. Every now and then he did burst out in anger and that's really what I wanted to see but instead for the most part, the audience will get a controlled anger. However, I also give credit to Keaton for making it look like being a criminal is as easy as one two three. It's unnerving. As for the musical score provided by renowned composer Hans Zimmer, was rather disappointing. It did have a few tunes that got the blood pumping and the muscles tense but there was no theme and there wasn't enough music the emmerse myself into the situations that occurred.However, the reason why I still give this movie the credit it deserves because of how real these situations can be. And the closer it gets to being in your house, the scarier it gets. Having a killer running around is one thing, having a cop breaking an entering because they lust for the a married couple's partner is another, but having a tenant that stalks you during the day and plans by night, can be really upsetting. I sure wouldn't want to be that couple. Whether its Jim Carrey, Richard Jordan, Ray Liotta, Michael Keaton or any other actor that plays mentally disturbed antagonists, these guys are just downright uncomfortable (in a good way). Even if the writing is formulaic, the fact that someone can be this unsettling will still creep people out. The music may not be very compelling either but Michael Keaton and his supporting cast do what is possible to keep the audiences' attention.