Two movies tonight, which are similar enough that they’re worth talking about together (and bad enough that they don’t deserve individual write-ups).

So week two of the Letterboxd Season Challenge is a previously-unseen movie with Ray Liotta. Between my wife and I, we’d pretty much seen all the obvious choices, and Cocaine Bear isn’t available, so we ended up watching Unlawful Entry.

So what’s surprising about this movie is that it’s from the ’90s, and so many ‘90s movies are all about how cities are full of gang violence and what we need is some thug-ass cops to break the rules and get stuff done. But in this one, the villain (Ray Liotta) is a cop.

Basically, Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe have someone break into their home and threaten her; the cops come to investigate, and Ray gets obsessed with Stowe. So he insinuates himself into their lives, then tries to ruin Kurt’s life (done with one part “being a cop” energy and one part “magic computer hacker” skills that he shows no sign of possessing) to get him out of the way.

The movie does, I think, a good job at showing the excesses of cop culture, and in showing how Kurt Russell’s macho bullshit doesn’t really help anything, but end of the day, it’s just a creepy weirdo being an obnoxious stalker, which isn’t that fun to watch.

The next movie, which is for some podcast of my wife’s, was Pacific Heights. This is one of those nineties-era “deranged person comes into your life and fucks it up” movies, like Fatal Attraction and Single White Female and… well, Unlawful Entry. In this case, the protagonists are a hapless young couple who rents out an apartment in their house to a conman Michael Keaton.

But it takes a while to get there, and the movie opens with one of the most confusing openings I’ve seen in a while. There are like four separate groups of people, all engaging in confusing in medias res activities. It takes a bit to realize that only two of these groups matter (the couple, and Michael Keaton), and a bit more for them to come together in such a way that you recognize what’s going on in the movie. (And probably like two-thirds of the way through the movie, before you realize what the other groups were up to.)

But so what Keaton ends up doing is renting this apartment… sort of: he never pays them, and never signs a lease agreement, and lies his way into the place… but then everyone is like “well, he’s living there, so the only way to get him out is through an eviction process that’ll take like six months.” It kinda seems like trespassing should be a thing? Well, it’s San Francisco, so who knows, maybe their laws really are that fucked.

Anyway, having moved in without paying, he now tricks them into turning off his power, at which point he sues them. Then he goads the landlord dude into a fight, at which point he gets a restraining order. It’s not really clear if his endgame is just to get free housing for a while, or to actually screw them over harder somehow, but ultimately it escalates to him shooting the dude non-fatally, and then using their past interactions to frame it as self-defense.

And the thing about this is, his con is only possible because the landlord dude reacts to every single situation with uncontrolled anger. Like, when a cop comes, and you’re the one who’s shouting and swearing while the other guy is cool and controlled, guess who they think is the problem? And when you’re the guy who’s been goaded into attacking someone, guess who they think is the problem (because you in fact are)? And when you violate a restraining order, and and and…

A theoretical core of the movie is the relationship between the landlord couple, but the problem here is that really quickly you end up hating the dude, and want her to just move out and leave this whole situation behind her. (What she does instead is, ultimately, act with intentionality and intelligence to find out information about Keaton and ruin his next con and get him arrested. But it’s notable that her rage-machine boyfriend had to get out of the picture first before she felt able to do anything.)

Due to its unpleasant protagonists, mushy plot, and vaguely-incoherent editing, this ends up being arguably a worse movie than Unlawful Entry, but really I don’t recommend either of them.

Side note: Man, California in the nineties had a smog problem. I think it’s better now?