Pacific Heights (1990) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

John Schlesinger directed this real estate thriller.

Did that catch your attention? Look at it this way. It's probably the BEST real estate thriller. It's the Schindler's List of real estate thrillers.

Drake (Matthew Modine) and Patty (Melanie Griffith) are an unmarried couple who are looking in San Francisco for their first place to co-habitate. Like many of us, they end up buying a property far beyond their means, a classic from the 1880s, by convincing themselves that it is a wise investment, and that they can make it affordable by renting out two downstairs units. The rental scheme seems reasonable to them, given that the vacancy race in their neighborhood is virtually zero, so they sink all of their life savings into buying the Victorian house and fixing it up, only to end up renting one of the units to a professional scam artist.

Carter Hayes is very familiar with the law, and uses it to his advantage. He finds overextended yuppies, rents from them, then does everything he can to be as annoying as possible. He ducks the rent, makes noises at all hours, scatters roaches through the walls and plumbing, and changes everything that the landlords have tastefully created. He hopes to accomplish one of two things. Either he gets the landlords to overreact in a way he can sue them for, or he simply forces them to miss their financial obligations, either way affording him an opportunity to obtain the property for himself at a price far below its market value.

According to one comment at IMDb:

Pacific Heights is required viewing in all Apartment Management courses in San Diego County. It is a chilling tale of decent but uneducated and unprepared new owners with a dream unknowingly up against a seasoned player in the professional renter game. This viewing requirement is one of the tools used to introduce starry-eyed management newcomers to the harsh and not-so-easily apparent world of the sick, the dangerous and the sue-happy portion of the rental market who will try to get the management stripped of all their personal assets and possessions, fired and possibly jailed.

This is billed as a thriller, but that description only applies to the last ten minutes or so, Before that, it's an annoyance movie. Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton) just keeps getting more and more irritating until we are forced to despise him and root for the yuppies. That isn't as easy to do as it is to conceive, because Matthew Modine's good guy doesn't seem even remotely sympathetic, and his reactions seem so exaggerated and panicky that you may end up rooting for Michael Keaton's bad guy - just because he isn't a complete wuss. The film might have worked better if the script had taken the time to develop the three main characters, allowing the audience to bond with Modine in some way, and allowing Keaton to be a real flesh-and-blood villain, more like a cold-blooded pragmatist and less like a cartoon bad guy. In a rather odd twist in the last fifteen minutes, Keaton switches from merely annoying into full-bore threatening. He grabs himself a nail gun, starts holding it to Melanie Griffith's head, and crosses the line from manipulative to psychotic.

To Keaton's credit, he did what he could with this script and made the film much better by his presence. Given his picky attitude toward projects, however, it's difficult to see what he liked about the role in the first place. I suppose he just wanted a chance to be a bad guy because he did this at the peak of his success, between his two Batman movies.

There's just not much to relate to in this movie. How much can the author expect me to care whether some virtually anonymous yuppies can make an enormous mortgage payment on a $750,000 home? What if they fail? Do they face being cast out into the humiliating world of sub-standard $350,000 housing -  or even (gasp!) an apartment? Will they lose their Starbucks card? Let's face it, this suffering ain't exactly on the same level of empathy as The Pianist.