Ace Ventura: Pet Detective | Vizcaya Museum and Gardens — The Party With a Shark in the Cellar

Ace arrives at the estate of Ronald Camp in a borrowed tuxedo, wrecks the small talk, and ends up in a basement tank arguing with a shark. The house he is trespassing in is Vizcaya, and the production did not need to invent a single thing about it.

James Deering, heir to a farm machinery fortune, built it between 1914 and 1922 at 3251 South Miami Avenue as a winter home dressed up as an old Italian villa that had stood for centuries. Thirty-four decorated rooms around an open courtyard. Ten acres of formal gardens cut into the mangrove on the edge of Biscayne Bay. Out in the water sits the stone barge, a carved breakwater with sculpted figures on it, which is the strangest and best thing in Miami. Deering was 56 when he moved in and dead within a decade.

Buy the ticket and take the garden route first. Go down the terraces to the bay wall, look back at the east facade with the barge in front of it, and the film's logic makes sense: if you were casting the house of a man who collects rare animals because he can, you would stop looking here too. Guides will tell you the pool grotto scenes were part of the same shoot.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.