lowquality.net

Nation of Ori­gin:
USA (Shot in Canada and most of the pro­duc­tion is French, but its an Eng­lish lan­guage film)

Rat­ings:
Justin: 4 ^1/2 out of 5
Kim: 4 ^1/2 out of 5

Notes: It’s really inter­est­ing how so few premises there really are in hor­ror. A lot of mod­ern hor­ror films do away with the super­nat­ural and get right into the poten­tially ter­ri­fy­ing world our every­day lives take place in. We totally take for granted that so many poten­tially lethal (or at best, bru­tally incon­ve­nient) sit­u­a­tions never actu­ally occur. In the case of P2, Angie, a some­what self-absorbed young pro­fes­sional who has for­saken her roots to live in the big city and is try­ing to go home for Christ­mas. Despite this, she doesn’t have the “teeth” required to make it in New York, she timidly shrugs off the apolo­gies of a co-worker who had made unwanted advances on her the night before and when what appears to be a series of unfor­tu­nate events that keep her locked in the park­ing garage, she encoun­ters an obses­sive secu­rity guard who “just wants to help her.” While other slasher films play with moral­ity and send a vio­lent killer after loose women, even Tom knows that Angie “is not a slut.” The angle in P2 is some­what more real­is­tic that nor­mal slasher trash: Angie is being preyed upon sim­ply because she is pas­sive and alone.

The whole “young urban female get­ting locked inside of a pub­lic build­ing” con­cept is exactly the same premise as in Creep, which we watched ear­lier this month (and hated). The remark­able sim­i­lar­i­ties between the two films is stag­ger­ing because that film really sucked and this one was god­damn awe­some. One of the big dif­fer­ences might be com­ing from behind the scenes: the film was co-written by Alexan­dre Aja (the director/writer of Haute Ten­sion, a favorite of ours this month) and Franck Khal­foun (who played Jimmy in Haute Ten­sion) and respec­tively Pro­duced and Directed by the pair. I think I love these guys. Much like Haute Ten­sion, the con­cept is so pedes­trian and com­mon on paper, but so unbe­liev­ably sat­is­fy­ing and well done on the screen that you will find your­self unable to explain what is so awe­some about it to your friends. Hit­ting the mark where Creep clearly missed is the emo­tional ele­ment: the first rule of slasher hor­ror is that you have to make the audi­ence choose sides. You are either with the killer or the vic­tim and you have to make the audi­ence acknowl­edge that con­nec­tion. Angie is a beau­ti­ful and seem­ingly decent human being thrust into a very ugly and ter­ri­fy­ing sit­u­a­tion: done, you’ve got us hooked, now what? She endures the very worst and you are with her the entire time, she’s not annoy­ing or obnox­ious (the bane of the hor­ror damsel) and she goes from vic­tim to tor­men­tor in very grad­ual and sat­is­fy­ing way.Tom is an unlikely antag­o­nist who is capa­ble of fits of rage while main­tain­ing an aura of boy­ish charisma that makes you kind of like him but still ulti­mately want to see him get it in the end.

Some­thing I found sim­i­lar to Haute Ten­sion are film­mak­ers obvi­ous love of Amer­i­can exploita­tion hor­ror but they are able to do it in such a classy and clever way that it doesn’t quite reg­is­ter as exploita­tion. Angie spends pretty much the entire film freez­ing her tail­feath­ers off in a low cut dress and there’s not many shots in the film where her cleav­age isn’t some­where in the scene… (well, look at the cover of the DVD case, yeah thats the whole film). Also, there are a hand­ful of pos­i­tively bru­tal moments that, while com­pletely exces­sive and vio­lent, don’t seem at all unnec­es­sary for the plot of the film.  Early on it is estab­lished to what level Tom’s skewed sense of ethics extends and later we see an exam­ple of what Angie’s strug­gle to sur­vive will cause her to do. So really, the gra­tu­itous­ness is curbed and it isn’t really gra­tu­itous. What­ever, this is hor­ror we’re talk­ing about, it’s all exploita­tion: boobs and blood blad­ders put asses in seats. End of discussion.

Yeah, I don’t have much snarky to say about this film other than it is kind of like Home Alone but if Macaulay Caulkin had fan­tas­tic breasts, a fireman’s axe and if it all took place in a park­ing garage.