There’s a place where I can go…It took Lakeview Terrace to remind me that we didn't know how good we
had it in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall had
crumbled, leaving post-Cold War America without a real international
threat; terrorism was a vague concept. Yet if you were to judge by the
movies, we were all buckets of free-floating anxiety convinced that
everyone around us would stab us in the neck with a letter opener if we
looked at them sideways.
Yes, it was the golden age of the
"fill-in-the-blank from hell" thriller-that time when your babysitter
(The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), your roommate (Single White Female),
your co-worker (The Temp), the girl next door (The Crush) or your kid's
new stepparent (Domestic Disturbance) was a psycho-in-waiting. Lakeview
Terrace appears in an age when paranoia seems just a bit more
justified, and you'd think that there would be room to re-explore the
genre in light of this. Instead, we get more or less what we would have
gotten 18 years ago: middling melodrama too concerned with providing
visceral kicks to uncover anything truly psychologically insightful.

