Simply A Masterpiece

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A classic example of how to ruin a good set-up with a crappy finale worthy of a Bugs Bunny cartoon (provided those cartoons sucked caj*nes and were made by cretins). The first hour sets up an interesting mystery that touches vaguely on the haunted house genre, but when the villain reveals itself the movie falls apart like a badly stacked up deck of cards hit by a cyclone.The villain is none other than the old geezer from the building. Now a quick rundown of the shoddiness of the goofy finale: the old geezer is basically indestructible and insane (though not near insane enough to pull of a string of tricks and manipulations that would normally require a sound mind and a dozen people). Juliette Lewis who shows spunk and courage throughout the movie behaves like a little schoolgirl lost when faced with this non-formidable foe who is shorter than Tom Cruise and has the build of a 14 year-old kid. She gets knocked out by him - yet again (does he walk barefoot? float through air?) - and then it's time for Thrilleric Clicherama 101: she knocks him out with a rod, but instead of finishing him off she, very typically for thriller/horror victims, throws AWAY her weapon, turns her backhriller/horror victims, throws AWAY her weapon, turns her back to the predictably not-badly-injured villain and very predictably he gets up to resume chasing her and endangers her yet again. Wow. Why must victims in thrillers always be so damn stupid in crucial situations?WHY do people who fight for their lives - in dumb thrillers and horrors (obviously, not in real life, when everyone goes to much greater lengths to crush/bash/annihilate/destroy/pulverize/neutralize/bash the attacker) - never CONTINUE bashing the villain, just to make sure they're incapacitated, severely injured or thoroughly killed? Is this some unwritten-rule pacifist movie thing invented by left-wing writers whereby the hero can never be shown to be human i.e. justifiably vicious toward their attacker?Dumber still, the janitor (played conveniently by the "Saw" guy before "Saw" was written and released by random dweeby knuckleheads), can't manage to overpower this tiny little old man, in a scene so stupid it can compete with any horsepoop from "Saw" or the even more amazingly dumb "Copycat" - perhaps even an Argento thriller. And then William Hurt just happens to arrive, and even he struggles to get the old man to put down the weapon.The killer's motives for murdering so many building residents without anyone noticing they're missing or dead? Some gobbledygook about Ancient Egypt, the serenity of peace and what-not: it's not as if any of that stuff made enough sense for me to pay much attention to the killer's obligatory and very silly why-I-dood-it speech. We never find out WHY the stench of several corpses - plus the maggots - only manage to reach and bother Lewis. Nor do we quite understand how come NOBODY wants to believe Lewis despite the fact she has bundles of evidence. The nonsense reaches Hitchockian levels, because the overrated chubster also tended to use ridiculous plot-devices that ensured that nobody ever believed the protagonist.Furthermore, they couldn't resist make the conspiracy even sillier. The epilogue heavily hints that William Hurt was in cahoots with the old geezer, which throws the already inane and far-fetched plot squarely into totally absurd territory. Once Lewis's boyfriend is somehow involved, one can safely say that literally nothing ties up logically.It gets dumber. The "Saw" guy acts extremely suspiciously. In fact, what Lewis saw through the window in his apartment should have pegged him as a serial-killer, at the very least, and yet he turns out to be a helper in need. In fact, everyone is made to behave suspiciously or oddly, including Shelley Duvall and even Lewis's female colleague. Needless to say, the viewer is lied to and manipulated in the worst shoddy-plot-device way, and then "rewarded" for his time spent watching this dross by giving us the most laughable killer in years.You anyway won't be able to find this movie easily, because it's made-for-TV drivel.

** THIS REVIEW COULD CONTAIN A LOT OF SPOILERS. I RECOMMEND THAT THE READER VIEW THE FILM FIRST IF THEY PREFER THAT THE FILM NOT BE SPOILED FOR THEM. THANK YOU. **I really liked this film, even though the mass majority leaves it with a 5.7, I say it was a 7.I believe the movie is severely under rated. It was a great story. Not only great, it was realistic. It isn't your everyday slasher/monster movie. It's very original. Juliet Lewis plays a great character, and you know what, she kind of looks like she would be an interior designer, like she is in the movie. She plays the part perfect. The only thing that I DON'T like about the movie, that isn't realistic, is how she just inherited her aunts apartment. You don't just inherit apartments. Unless the law is different in New York, I thought only something you owned directly could be written in a Will? I'm not sure, but if it were a condo it would've been more convincing, which is one reason I gave the movie a 7 instead of an 8. Juliet Lewis is trying to settle down in her apartment, after the murder of her aunt. As she moves her belongings into the apartment, weird stuff starts happening. A neighbor starts destroying the floor from a bottom apartment, rats start showing up by the hundreds, and other weird notes start appearing. Apparently, someone doesn't want her there. At this point anyone would know it's one of the people living in the building. That's a given. It's just who? She meets all of them, and they all seem nice. However, that's not enough to convince her to move into her weather broadcaster boyfriends country home. She wants to stay where she is, and live on her own for awhile. As she does, she continues to experience these weird encounters. She eventually gets a package that reveals a picture of her dead aunt buried under a bunch of packing peanuts. This freaks her out. There's rumors throughout the building that floor floor houses this person who never comes out. A homebody who she thinks is trying to sabotage her. Of course the person is on the fourth floor...Towards the end, she breaks an entering into the infamous apartment four. She discovers who ever lives there is a psycho path. You get to find out who this is, and when you do, you'll be surprised. Although, what I like about the surprise, is that there's a surprise behind the surprise. It's definitely a eye opener to Juliet's character. Juliet Lewis eventually gets in a fight with this person, and a guy comes and knocks the person out from behind. Then, the person gets up again, runs after her, and is threw down the stairwell by her boyfriend who decides to visit. She then decides to finally move in with him on the country side. At the end, a certain person watched what went on in the fourth floor apartment, and painted a picture on a canvas of what he ob served earlier. It was a painting of her boyfriend negotiating with this psychopath. So, the boyfriend is willing to do anything for possession. The certain person he negotiated with was nuts, and used the whole building as a fortress. I will not give the reader all of the the person did, it is worth watching for.An overall summary would conclude that the acting was good and the story was believable. There was just some parts that the viewer would be saying "yeah right." Some logic was just poorly used in the script. All in all, I think this movie deserves more than a 5.7 rating. It's good for a one time watch.

I love bad films, but this was so boring I gave up after an hour. My better half confirmed the outcome was as we had expected.Shelley Duval is great in the small time she has on screen. If only the rest of the film was as good.Reliance on too many million-to-one coincidences is never a good sign, but that is only part of the problem. If you want to make a story that will involve and (hopefully) scare the audience, sticking to basics would be useful.Deciding whether it is a comedy or a serious film would be a good start. Sadly the filmmakers cannot seem to decide.Throwing the kitchen sink at the screen is only good if it is intended as a comedy. Otherwise it just makes the whole thing look stupid.My tip? Watch "Fanny by Gaslight" instead.

I was confused from the beginning of "The 4th Floor" because, fool that I am, it never once occurred to me that this young woman talking with William Hurt (who is my age) was actually his girlfriend. She looked like his daughter and in fact, with the 23 year difference in their ages, could have been. Once that was out of the way, I started to concentrate.This is a pretty scary movie if you like the genre, but it doesn't make any sense. I can understand Jane moving into her late aunt's apartment - it's New York City, after all, reasonably priced apartments are hard to come by, and she doesn't want to move in with her boyfriend. But no matter how reasonable the rent, no one would have stayed in that building. The neighbors are all totally bizarre and someone - she thinks it's her neighbor on the 4th floor -- is tormenting her. Aggressively.There are sometimes one can put these problems in a film aside and sometimes that one can't. This would be one of the times that one can't. It really stretched all reason. If it was the type of film where one just had to suspend belief, that would have been another story, but it wasn't.I figured the plot out long before the denouement, although the ending is ambiguous in a way. The acting was mixed. Lewis sounded like she was imitating Jennifer Elise Cox's character on Lovespring, and Hurt's role was beneath him. The supporting players were the marvelous Austin Pendleton and Shelley Duvall who gave wonderful and interesting performances.All in all, scary stuff, good atmosphere, an okay rental.