The 4th Floor

When interior decorator Juliette Lewis inherits a handsome, huge New York apartment at the rent-controlled monthly bargain of $400, it looks too good to be true. It is. Walking into the creepiest collection of neighbors since Roman Polanski's The Tenant, she's accosted by nosy first-floor busybody Shelley Duvall ("Is that your boyfriend? Oh, you like older men?"), a surly superintendent who isn't allowed his own set of keys, a mystery tenant who flees at the sight of her, and a reclusive fourth-floor neighbor who turns a war of wills into an all-out guerrilla campaign of terror. When her place is overrun with rats and maggots (yech!), pushy boyfriend William Hurt insists she leave, but she's determined to continue her first bout of independence...even if it kills her.

First-time director Josh Klauser manages an entertaining if not quite engaging bit of urban paranoia--what apartment dweller hasn't worried about a secretive neighbor?--but lets it all slip into a silly, half-baked climax and a thoroughly predictable final twist. He also slips in references to Rear Window and Pacific Heights (two other paranoid tales of nasty neighbors), but none of it compares to morning-show personality Hurt's creepy TV weather clown routine: he sings, he dances, he chirps "Rise and shine" with the droopy-eyed intensity of an over-caffeinated drug addict. Now that's scary. --Sean Axmaker