P2
If you’ve ever
watched any movie before you’ll know that people are constantly getting
assaulted in parking garages. I’m sure
that there’s enough parking garage assault footage spread over the five Death
Wish films alone to fill an entire movie’s running time. So it’s not really a surprise that they
finally went for a movie solely about parking garage assault.
The result is
this film P2, which is basically Die Hard re-envisaged as a
horror movie. You’ve got pretty much the
same setup and a lot of the same thrills; a shoeless hero trapped in a
skyscraper on Christmas Eve pitted against a maniac and having to riggle through various shafts and scurry up and down
concrete stairwells and try to alert the authorities but ultimately having to
solve things themselves.
Whereas the box
of Die Hard calls it ‘40 Stories of Sheer Adventure!’ this P2
movie only involved the four underground levels of the skyscraper and is
proportionally as amusing. The hero in
this one is a large-breasted woman instead of Bruce Willis. And instead of using the building’s fire hose
to repel down the side of exploding Nakatomi Plaza,
the fire hose is used to spray the hero’s hooters and make them all shiny. They’ve replaced Hans Gruber with a
disgruntled parking lot attendant. And
they’ve replaced Karl, who acted as Hans’s attack dog, with an actual attack
dog (rottweiler).
I’ve watched
this movie twice (once for each ‘P’) now so I guess I must like it. I’ll say that these guys definitely came to
work with a script and the desire to make a low-budget concept work. These guys really gave it their all to edge
out Wrong Turn and I Know What You Did Last Summer as the
zeitgeist of movies where you watch an enormous rack jiggle on the precarious
edge of spilling out of a low cut top, but they also gave you a movie that I’m
pretty sure would still be amusing without the hooterage.
For example,
the first scene just seemed like filler to pad out this movie before the horror
shit started, but the things they mentioned in this scene actually all came
back later in the film. Well, that’s not
entirely true. Early on she’s dragging a
giant teddy bear around that’s supposed to be a gift for her nephew. I would’ve liked it if later in the film the
killer hid in the teddy and when she went to pick it up it sprung to life and
chased her around the parking garage.
But they
actually establish this young lady as a believable and consistent
character. She’s obviously a
well-mannered well-educated but kinda cold young lady. So during one of my favourite ridiculous
scenes in this movie in which she plays chicken with the bad guy we get her
revving up the engine and trying to psyche herself up for the charge by cussing
to herself something like “You wanna fuckin’ do this?
Let’s fuckin’ do this
shit?” But the way the actress
hesitates on the profane words and delivers these lines really conveys that she
doesn’t typically swear and that this is hard for her. And you read that right, they fucking play
chicken in the underground parking garage in this movie. And what’s better is it’s not even the end of
the movie.
And I want to
give props to this Wes Bentley guy. He
totally invests himself in playing the evil parking lot attendant. I know he’s recently worked with Nick Cage in
Ghost Rider and he clearly used that
as an opportunity to learn from the grandmaster Cage himself. There’s the shouting, there’s the arm waving,
there’s the wacky voice quiverings of Cage, but most
importantly there’s the personal Cage touch.
I got a big
smile on my face when this movie stops in the middle for the evil parking lot
attendant to pull a little statuette of Elvis out of his desk, put in on top of
his record player which he then uses to blast Elvis’s singing of ‘Blue
Christmas’ over the parking lot loudspeaker while he dances and sings
along. This Bently
guy hasn’t yet achieved the level of baldness needed to wear signature Cage
hairpieces, but he’s got his own thing going with his wacky eyebrow plucking
that makes him look like he’s always got one raised. He’s got definite potential for a bright
future as an overactor.
His character
is in that long line of service industry stalker badguys. He’s kind of the cheeseball
cousin to the character of Robin Williams in One Hour Photo. There’s a really
funny monologue where he rants about being stuck in the underground parking
garage by society like he’s somehow forbidden from applying for a job where he
gets to see the fucking sun. I’m still
waiting for a movie that flips it and makes some Katherine Heigel
type playing a successful businesswoman who stalks and menaces a janitor played
by Danny Trejo and nobody believes him.
I watched the
special features on the DVD to see if the filmmakers or lead actress discussed
the omnipresent cleavage in this film but they avoid the issue. But don’t tell
me this chick didn’t know what she was doing.
There’s probably a longer goddamn class for learning to work your boobs like
this than to do movie kung-fu or speak movie Spanish, esse. And there’s probably a week in every
cinematography course on lighting boobs for the screen taught by Hype Williams.
I don’t want to
give you guys false hope so I’ll tell you right now
you don’t see this lady’s boobs in this movie.
One of the main evolutionary steps in horror cinema has been to trade
getting to see average to poor breasts completely bare in exchange for movies
that tease us with perfectly supported cleavage but never fully reveal
breasts. I think we’ve gained in that
trade, but I’m sure it’s a huge debate.
I’m not a huge
student of horror cinema. I don’t read
horror magazines like Fangoria. I can’t spot all these trendy cameos of some
dude who died in a famous scene deleted from Re-Animator 2 or whatever when he shows up as a bar tender in some
new hipster horror movie. If you asked
me for my favourite horror titles it would be the same indisputable shit that gets
hauled out onto the revolving display rack at Halloween time at Blockbuster
video.
I’m kind of
this genre’s somewhat reliable fuckbuddy, and I’m no purist
blowhard. I can accept that newschool horror isn’t oldschool
horror and enjoy the odd flick without expecting a classic. I liked Wrong
Turn, I liked Jeepers Creepers, and
I enjoyed this too. It’s got good
tension and even though the body count is low they deliver some good gore when
somebody does get killed. Plus there’s
that Elvis part. But even if you are one
of those purist blowhards who just rents new horror movies
to piss and moan about how they aren’t the 1970s or 80s then you should rent
this too, since that’s what you do. The
picture’s pretty clear, so you can start by complaining about that. I’ll even give you a catchy phrase: no grain = no gain. Merry Fucking Christmas.
It turns out
the director of this film is a protégé of Alexandre Aja, director of High
Tension. It turns out Aja wanted somebody else to take this project and bring
their own eyes to it, and I have to say it was big step up over High Tension in that P2 actually makes fuckin’
sense. I’ve done a bit of research and
it turns out getting somebody else to go over your ideas and check them for
problems and polish it up a bit is a process called ‘proofreading’ and I think
more movies should try it. Seriously.
If you liked this, here are some other
related articles:
Bloody Bird: A Film About an Owl
that Kills Actors with a Chainsaw
This film was also released as “Stagefright”,
“Deleria”, and “Aquarius”,
but you didn’t see it under those names either.
The horror movie that calls you back and chokes your cat.
There Will Be Superbad Blood!