P2

Franck Khalfoun Written by: Franck Khalfoun (screenplay), Alexandre Aja (screenplay/story), Gregory Levasseur (screenplay/story) Starring: Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley, Philip Atkin, Stephanie Moore, Miranda Edwards Distributed by Tartan Distribution Film will be released in the U.K. on May 2nd 2008 Review by Michael Edwards

rating: 2

What could be scarier than being locked in a dark car-park with nobody around? How about if you were in the boot of a car in the carpark? Sound freaky? Well, I guess it does. How about if it was Christmas too, and you were a sexy rich businessperson of some sort? And you were being pursued by a lonely car park attendant and his dog? Last question before I start making statements: ever wonder why some films just take stuff a bit too far and end up being a bit crap? So, here we are again, another tacky horror film. Just as I was beginning to feel spoilt with such great chillers as The Orphanage (review HERE) and (review HERE) it all gets smashed to pieces by P2 and that disastrously poor remake of The Eye (review HERE). The premise of this film, which I've touched on above, is that Angela, a beautiful high-flying businesswoman (she might be a lawyer or an insurance salesperson or something), sets off to go home after a long, hard day. She reaches her car on the second level of the car park under her swanky office building and realises it won't start. She calls a cab but the porter has disappeared so she can't get out. Suddenly we jump cut to her being wrestled to the ground, her mouth covered in a chloroform-soaked cloth. The next thing we know she is being held prisoner by a lonely and mildly psychotic security guard. From here the tale becomes one of the captive trying to flee the captor. Oh and it's Christmas (why give it a May release date?!) It's really quite a simple concept but it just doesn't quite work, and I think the crux of why this film has taken a plausible (if uninspired) horror concept and gotten a bit lost somewhere is the decision to mess up the working relationship between Franck Khalfoun and Alexandre Aja. Khalfoun was a great actor in SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE (US: HIGH TENSION), on which Aja was co-writer and director, but joining Aja and Levasseur on the writing side and having a stab at the directing appears to have taken what is a palatable slasher plot and mutated it into some bumbling psychological horror that fails to live up to its potential. Psychotic security guard Thomas is meant to be scary because he's just an ordinary guy, but Wes Bentley is too good-looking to be convincingly ordinary and lonely, and too bad an actor to pull of an scenes of insanity without the audience bursting out into spontaneous laughter. What's more the film is riddled with cliches: there is nothing I hate more than a moment of silence before 'BANG!' A dog barks, or someone walks round a corner from the dark. The psychological cliches are even worse as the film plays on the most overused and outdated cinematic tool of the 'masculine gaze' which relies so heavily on all us guys loving to see Rachel Nichols inexplicably doused with water and running around in a clingy dress being pursued by a guy who is watching her on CCTV. The predictable moment when she subverts this male control fantasy not only undermines the reliance of this movie on it, but also fails to provide any excitement as the blundering Thomas was a weak and useless villain from the start. On the positive side, a rottweiler does get its head bashed in with a tyre iron, and there are plenty of ridiculous chase and fight scenes which will make you provide a few laughs, but as a horror film P2 sucks, pure and simple. If you enjoy inadvertent pastiche to the back-to-basics horrors that offer little more than loud noises and ridiculous acts of violence perpetrated by poorly devised two-dimensional characters then P2 is an hour and a half well spent, otherwise I'd save your hard-earned cash for something better. P2 is released in UK cinemas on 2nd of May. For more background on the movie straight from the horse's mouth, I had a phone chat with Alexandre Aja which can be read HERE.