A Week of "P" Movies: P2

I know I'm getting into the next week with this post here, but I had to get P2 on my blog somewhere.

It's a divisive movie among horror fans and I sort of understand why. I'm on the side that really likes the movie. I would think more guys would like this movie... the whole poster is just of her boobies. Don't men like boobies?

The "here's what it's about" paragraph: On Christmas Eve, Angela is working late at her swanky office building, trying to get done so she can go to her sister's house. When her car won't start and she can't get out of the building to get a cab, she's abducted by the night security guard, Thomas. He says he just wants some company for Christmas, but Angela realizes that he's not all there and has to find a way to get out of this parking garage alive. Rachel Nichols plays Angela and Wes Bentley's eyebrows play the madman Thomas.

I'd like to give a through-the-Internet
fist bump to Alex Aja. 

P2 was the brain child of gore-meister Alexandre Aja and some other dudes. Completely different from his other films but that's awesome. P2 is more simplistic and atmospheric, while it does have a touch of gore just for fun. I like the casting of Rachel Nichols because she is one of the only actresses who looks like a normal person. Pretty, but not insanely hot, therefore I like her and her character. Wes Bentley I only knew from American Beauty so when I first saw the movie, I wasn't sure how I would feel about him playing a psycho, and playing it believably. He's a little young for role, maybe, but on the whole his random crazy outbursts and sweet-boy face that can instantly turn into mean-boy face actually worked for me.

After Angela wakes up from Thomas drugging her with chloroform, we get a very creepy scene of Thomas's Christmas dinner romancing thing he's set up for her. It's a good surprise moment when Angela, feeling sick, falls out of her chair and we see that her ankle is chained to the table leg. Then when he makes her call her sister to say she won't be able to make it to the family gathering, Thomas stands behind her, grabbing and caressing her neck and chest and it's almost torture to watch her try to keep her composure. Why she doesn't just yell out something like "I'm still at work, HELP!" is beyond me. But then we wouldn't have a movie, would we?

He's right behind you, dipshit.

I have to give the filmmakers credit for making a movie set in an underground parking garage and being able to keep the action different and interesting. I think of those places as just big, open spaces. Creepy, yes, with the shadowed corners and echoing noises, but there's not much to them. P2 gives us something unexpected at every turn. Angela tries hiding in an elevator, which Thomas fills with water. The touch of gore comes in when Angela stabs Thomas in the eye and when Thomas rams a guy strapped to a chair into a wall with his car and his intestines spill out. Niiiiiice. A game of vehicular chicken shows Angela's horrible driving skills but leads us to a great conclusion to the film.

This movie even includes the absolute one thing that I hate seeing in movies which is somebody's FINGERNAIL BEING RIPPED OFF. I don't even want to look for a picture of it because I can't fucking stand that shit. Chop off their heads, pull out their guts, put them in a meat grinder, I don't care. Just don't show somebody's fingernail popping off. Even if the fingernail thing is a POSSIBILITY, I don't want to see it. Like one of those scenes where someone's being dragged and they're all scraping at the floor and walls - that's enough to get me squirming in my seat. Hate it, hate it, hate it.

I'm telling you, those eyebrows
are out of control.

And get this: there's an evil dog in the movie, and Angela actually kills it. They break one of the unwritten rules of films - you can't kill dogs. Kill as many humans as you like, but once Fido gets it, the audience will fucking hate you. "Yeah, but what if it's an evil dog who tries to eat you?" Eh, still a little iffy. There's usually some asshole in the movie who's going to say, "He's just a defenseless animal!! How could you do that??!!" To this, I say, Defenseless? My ass. Eighty pounds of muscle and sharp-sharp teeth hardly constitutes as defenseless.

Most reviews call Wes Bentley's performance, and the film overall, comedic. You can tell me that all you want and I still won't believe it. I think Bentley's reputation as the weird kid from American Beauty helped him in making Thomas more menacing. He doesn't actually hurt Angela in any way, but rather keeps getting in her way of escaping. His character is not meant to be a knife-wielding psycho. He is simply a cunning foe who knows the location better than our heroine, therefore he has one up on her. I sincerely believe that Thomas does not want to kill Angela. He has murderous tendencies, obviously, but perhaps he will only keep her locked up in his office for a few days instead of killing her. That wouldn't be so bad, would it? I'm sure he has plenty of frozen dinners to eat, Angela, and maybe you'll come to think of his dorky Elvis impersonations as, well... kind of cute. Or maybe not.

I give the movie props for trying something new that could have come off as cheesy and ridiculous. Some people still say that it is cheesy and ridiculous... and implausible and laughable and all kinds of other mean words but I say they're wrong. I like P2 and I don't care what you think!

The film also gets points for reemphasizing the fact that calling a woman the "c" word is never a good idea. Burn him, girlfriend!

The Number 2 Classic Horror Film Remake

The Hills Have Eyes!!!

I loooooved the remake of Wes Craven's classic, The Hills Have Eyes. Directed by Alexandre Aja, the man behind the awesome, inspiring, kick-ass, bloody, gory, and delicious High Tension, THHE was the perfect film for him to take on (after THHE, Aja directed Mirrors, another thrilling and creepy movie - the jaw rip scene is probably the most horrific thing I've ever seen).

Perhaps I shouldn't really be writing a blog comparing and contrasting the original and the remake because it has been WAY too long since I've seen the original.

No, wait. I just found it on YouTube. I love that site.

But seriously, the remake is such an exceptional horror film. It defines horror in both the aspect of gore and violence, and also in the sense of revealing the real horrors of humans. The basic story is a concept Wes Craven used in his first film, The Last House on the Left - two different families, one (for lack of better terms) good and one evil. The families clash in some way and the good, or normal, family is forced to become just as evil and ultimately murderous as the other family, so who is really the evil one?

In THHE, we have the quintessential mutant hillbilly "family." They are grossly deformed due to evil government nuclear bombing or some crap, and live in the hills in the desert, terrorizing, attacking, stealing from, and eating people that happen to travel through their smorgasbord of gross-ness. We really get a taste for what these mutants are capable of in the famous scene depicting their blitz attack on the trailer. I love this scene, and I love that the filmmakers had the balls to keep this scene just as relentless and horrible as the original. The dad is burned to death, the mother is shot, the younger daughter is raped, the older daughter with the baby is ruthlessly shot in the head, and the baby is kidnapped. Holy crap. Oh, and the one mutant bites the head off of a bird and drinks the blood from its neck.

I'm so surprised that a lot of this stuff made it into the final film... so many taboos in one scene. But that's what it takes to make a really successful and gripping horror film. You've gotta have the balls to show people things that they might not want to see. This is reality, this is what it takes to get people to show what they are really made of. What can a person or group of people endure and still have the will to live, to fight?

Such a great message behind the guise of a violent horror film. Viewers that just see that part of the film, though, don't know how to dig deeper and see the beauty that can exist in these types of films. The cinematography in THHE is gorgeous. The colors are all muted to blend in with the background of the dirt and other shades of brown of the desert. Splotches of color pop up in certain places - the red hoodie, for instance - but most of the film seems drained of color, which gives the viewer a real sense of place and feeling like they are in the desert too.

We've got some faces you might recognize in this movie from other small roles they've done, and the acting couldn't be better. The scene where Kathleen Quinlan, the mother, is dying, is so heartbreaking. Her facial expressions, the way she's shaking and obviously in immense pain... gosh, it's horrible. Vinessa Shaw's character is sweet, a new mother who lays down her life for her baby. I wanted so much to see more of her in this movie, and her character died way too soon. But it was a very good shocking moment for the film.

The violence and gore are at just the right levels, if not a little too much at times. The nerdy guy ends up carrying an axe and covered in blood by the end of the film, so what does that tell you? You'd think they wouldn't have much to work with in the way of setting, way out in the desert as they are. However, one of the characters stumbles across a very creepy makeshift town, apparently used in those nuclear bomb experiments in the fifties. The town is complete with mannequin families and fake appliances... plus some members of that mutant family that seem to make this fake town their home. Creepy little girl that has the face of an 70 year old shows up in one of the houses... *shudder*. Some excellent fight scenes take place in this setting, as well.

A good movie on its own, and an absolutely solid remake of a classic story from horror master Wes Craven.

Stay tuned for the number 3 best horror remake, which also happens to be my personal favorite of the three.