During the late '80s and early '90s, cinemas swarmed with the cinematic bastard children of Fatal Attraction, films in which someone close to the protagonist turns out to be a raving psychotic. The psycho-next-door sub-genre has tapered off over the last couple of years, but plenty of the films are still released on home video, where budgets and audience expectations tend to be pretty low. Predictable but surprisingly effective, Under Pressure stars Charlie Sheen as a hero fireman who's also a world-class nutcase. A sort of better-looking, lantern-jawed cousin of the malevolently conformist serial killer Terry O'Quinn played in The Stepfather, Sheen's character is a divorced, depressed loner whose hunger for order and discipline has turned him into a sort of emotional fascist unable to tolerate what he perceives as weakness and laziness in others. Mare Winningham co-stars as Sheen's next-door neighbor, a jittery but happily married mother and wife whose life crosses paths with Sheen's when her children accidentally break the former brat-packer's window, leading to a series of tense run-ins between Winningham's family and the increasingly unhinged Sheen. Under Pressure doesn't break new ground thematically or cinematically, and its climax is predictably silly and over-the-top, inexplicably predicated by yet another scene in which a nefarious stalker sneaks into someone's home and—the horror!—rearranges her furniture. But it's also a well-made, well-acted little B-movie (Sheen and Winningham both give surprisingly textured, multidimensional performances, as does David Andrews as Winningham's husband) that almost, but never quite, transcends the silliness of its genre.