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SINGLE WHITE FEMALE brought us the roommate from hell. SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY the husband from hell. Hell, CRUSH brought us the teenage crush from hell. PACIFIC HEIGHTS brings us the tenant from hell. And it works much better than all those above movies, because the psycho is more than a psycho.

The “From Hell” thriller sub-genre is often pretty predictable. Not that this film breaks that mold, but it’s more believable and has a nice twist. Patty Palmer (Melanie Griffith, WORKING GIRL) and Drake Goodman (Matthew Modine, SHORT CUTS) are a boyfriend and girlfriend who buy an old apartment in San Francisco with the idea that if they rent out the two units below them they will be saving money on what they use to pay on rent before.

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Lately, too many people think of Woody Allen for his recent dry patch of films and his messy personal life. A lot of people discount anything that Allen made since the ‘90s. I disagree. HUSBANDS AND WIVES is amazing, BULLETS OVER BROADWAY is wonderfully entertaining and MIGHTY APHRODITE, EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU, DECONSTRUCTING HENRY, SWEET AND LOWDOWN and ANYTHING ELSE are all good films. The problem is that Allen keeps making films and if he doesn’t come out with a masterpiece every time everyone says he’s lost his stuff.

MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s just as entertaining as BULLETS OVER BROADWAY. Larry and Carol Lipton (Allen & Diane Keaton, ANNIE HALL) are a middle-aged couple who have come upon a dry spot in their marriage. Larry is a book editor, who tries to set up his flirtatious client Marcia Fox (Anjelica Huston, THE WITCHES) with his best friend Ted (Alan Alda, TV’s MASH), who is starting a restaurant with Carol and has had secret crush on her for years. Larry and Carol one night meet their next-door neighbors Paul and Lillian House (Jerry Adler, TV’s THE SOPRANOS & Lynn Cohen, WALKING & TALKING) for the first time. Then when Lillian turns up dead and Paul seems less than torn up about it, Carol gets it into her mind that Mr. House killed her.

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Clint Eastwood returns to the Western genre, which made him a superstar, in his second film as a director. Like his characters in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, his character here is only known as the stranger, who rides into a small town called Lago.

Eastwood plays on Western conventions with the stranger watched suspiciously by the entire town to start off the film. Some thugs challenge him and they don’t make it to the second act. This is where the grittiness of the film kicks in with the stranger virtually raping the blonde and voluptuous Callie Travers (Marianna Hill, THE GODFATHER: PART II) in a barn. The cowardly and corrupt town quickly gathers to decide that they will give the stranger anything he wants to kill three bandits who have just been released from jail and are certainly headed back to the town for revenge. The stranger takes the work, but what the town doesn’t know is that he has an ulterior motive.

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When I first saw the trailers for this film, I thought to myself — didn’t we get enough of this plot with BIG, 18 AGAIN, VISA VERSA or the original FREAKY FRIDAY? But when Jamie Lee Curtis received good reviews, my interest was piqued. I caught it on cable finally and I was surprised with some of its honest observations.

Anna Coleman (Lindsay Lohan, HERBIE FULLY LOADED) is a teenager in a rock band and her psychiatrist mother Tess (Curtis, A FISH CALLED WANDA) is about to get remarried to a man named Ryan (Mark Harmon, CHASING LIBERTY). The big conflict comes when Anna’s band has a big audition on the night of Tess’ rehearsal dinner. Neither of them can understand nor imagine the other’s point of view. A magic fortune cookie changes this by having Anna and Tess switch bodies.

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