Officer Pete Davis is just dreamy, but then psychopaths often are.
Ray Liotta's Officer Pete in Unlawful Entry (1992) is very well-written. He wants to take Karen (Madeleine Stowe) away from Michael (Kurt Russell) and he is in fact impotent without that sense of victory over someone he's insecure about. He infantilises and emasculates Michael having first become a trusted friend which makes it that much more difficult for Michael to resist being defined in that humiliating way. Michael manages to listen to his instinct that something is wrong and Pete begins to torment Michael into anti-social behaviour while being charming and unobjectionable. He can always claim his intentions were friendly when he crosses boundaries and often he can even defend his actions with a reminder that Michael had actually said that he wanted this or that thing to happen - in each case, Michael had quite obviously just been speaking casually.
Michael is onto him first and Karen thinks he’s overreacting - people are usually quicker at spotting dodgy behaviour in members of their own sex, perhaps because of background intrasexual competition that underlies nearly all social interactions - but he is eventually able to get her to see it. Any woman who Pete fails to seduce is devalued as a whore and discarded. Karen ends up having to play along with his delusion in order to avoid being killed.
Unlawful Entry came out the same year as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle which features a female psychopath employing similar tactics and who is just as deadly.
