P2 - Movie Review

P2 (2007)
Directed by Franck Khalfoun
-Spoilers ahead-

Our film begins with a sweeping view of Level P2 of a parking garage, as "Santa Baby" creepily drones on in the background, and we see a handcuffed woman bust out of the trunk of a car screaming.  Wait, what?!

As we rewind back to earlier in the evening, we see aforementioned handcuffed woman is Angela, a Type A overworked businesswoman working late on Christmas eve.  A man named Jim comes into her office and apologizes for getting drunk and making a move on her.  This seemed odd and out of place at the beginning of the film but I'm only mentioning it because it factors in later in the movie in my favorite scene.

 

Angela finally gets ready to leave to see her family but finds her car won't start.  She goes into the security office where we meet Thomas (Wes Bentley of American Beauty fame), the bumbling, awkward, yet slightly condescending security guard who tries to jump her battery and then invites her to have a Christmas meal with him.  Angela is noticeably off-put by Thomas and goes upstairs to call a cab and take a nap.  Once her cab arrives, Angela finds she is locked in the building and cannot get out.  As she struggles to unlock the door, she watches her cab drive away when all of a sudden all the lights in the building go out.  Angela begins to walk around in the dark and gets chloroformed by Thomas.

 

Here's where it all starts to get weird.  Angela wakes up ankle-chained to a table in the security office, wearing a white dress, and sitting at a table with a Christmas meal on it as Thomas begins to grill her on questions about her personal life while wearing a Santa costume.  (Lol what?!)  Santa then decides to give her a gift of a VHS tape of the security footage of Jim drunkenly groping her in the company elevator.  Thomas unlocks Angela so they can take a romantic walk together and she stabs him in the shoulder with a fork as his Rottweiler guard dog barks maniacally in the background.  Angela doesn't get far though before being tackled and shoved into a car by Thomas and thus we get to my favorite part of the movie because I'm a sick freak.

We see Jim tied up in a chair in the parking garage as Thomas instructs Angela to go beat him with a flashlight to prove that she's not a slut (Lol what?!) Thomas keeps repeating that he's here to help Angela, not hurt her, further cementing that he's a full-blown creepy stalker psycho.  He gets out of the car and beats Jim's face in with the flashlight.  But oh no, he's not done yet, he gets back in the car and pushes Jim's rolly chair through the parking garage with his bumper and then smashes him into the concrete wall.  We see Jim's intestines pouring out as Thomas backs the car up and hits him again, smashing his head to smithereens.

 

Angela is rightfully freaked the F out and she manages to escape the car and the rest of the movie is essentially a cat and mouse chase scene through the many different levels of the parking garage.  We see Angela trap herself in an elevator, which Thomas then floods from above with the emergency fire hose, almost drowning Angela.  We see Thomas dance to Blue Christmas and shake his hips like Elvis in the security office for no apparent reason.  We see Angela manage to frantically call 911 and as the cops arrive, Thomas tazes her and hides her body in her car trunk before putting on a show of innocence for the cops.

 

Our movie culminates with Angela trying to chase the cops as they drive away and then getting herself chased by Rocky the Rottweiler.  Angela turns into a super badass and kills Rocky with a tire iron.  This scene is pretty nasty and I hate when animals die in movies but it was Angela or Rocky, so Rocky had to go.  This of course pisses Thomas off to the ultimate level and they end up having a game of chicken with two cars on level P2 of the parking garage.  Thomas swerves at the last minute and Angela ends up flipping her car by taking the curves too fast.  Thomas approaches her car thinking she's dead, but nope, she stabs him in the eye with what looks like a nail file and then chokes him with her handcuffs.  In one final outburst of psychoticness, Thomas screams after Angela, "Why can't we be friends?  Why can't we just spend Christmas together?" and then lets out a stream of expletives which should never be used against women including the B word and the C word.  Okay Thomas, you gots to go.  Angela tazes a trail of gasoline leading up to the car and sets Thomas on fire.  You go, girl.

So as you can probably tell by the description, I wouldn't classify this film so much as a creepy scary horror film but more of an unsettling tension-filled thriller, which I always enjoy.  I might be in the minority for this, but I love movies that take place in only one setting with very few characters, as P2 did.  Exam and Pontypool are other great movies with minimal characters and setting changes.  I feel these "one-setting" movies are a true test of acting skills to see how well the main characters can carry a story and keep the viewer interested without tons of set changes, special effects, and secondary characters.  Rachel Nichols and Wes Bentley do a great job in P2.  She is convincing as a strong badass woman who doesn't give up and he is convincing as a super psycho who didn't get enough attention growing up.

The character of Angela was a compelling one, as she didn't necessarily have any violent tendencies or superhuman strength.  She was just a regular businesswoman caught in a terrifying situation and did the best she could to escape with what she was given to work with.  She fought Thomas to the end, ran her heart out in a skimpy white dress, and wasn't afraid to get covered in dog blood.  P2 didn't have a plethora of special effects or a supernatural element.  There was no mystery or twist ending.  There were no real jump scares.  BUT what it did have was a great build of tension in essentially an hour long chase scene and it had blood and gore.  And it had a guy's head explode.  Two thumbs up!

-Amanda

Come Back to Me - Movie Review

Come Back to Me

Released 2014

Directed by Paul Leyden

Slight plot spoilers but NO ENDING SPOILERS

Hold the phone, alert the presses, a pig has grown wings and just flew past my head, I found a recent horror movie that I LIKE, I really like!! In fact - I watched Come Back to Me on a Friday night while my husband was out and when he got back I told him about it and we watched it together Saturday morning and HE liked it as well! (Normally we rip movies to shreds when we watch them together, haha.)  This means, I watched this movie twice within a 24 hour time period and perhaps I have a fever but I'd actually watch it a third time.

Now granted, before I get too carried away, this isn't an Academy Award worthy picture, folks.  In fact, there's nothing too special or over the top about it.  It isn't exorbitantly freaky or disturbing or groundbreaking.  It's a good 'ol fashioned tale of a lead female with anxiety stalked by the creeper next door with requisite long hair and smelly house.  But it gets deeper and there's a twist at the end that is epic and I'm not gonna tell you what it is for once!  However, all I will say is this, if you're a fan of happy endings, well, you're SOL on this one.

Our story opens with a teenage boy, Dale, sitting on the couch holding his pet rabbit and hearing his mom get murdered by his stepfather.  Or so we are led to believe...

 

Flash forward about ten years and we meet our main character, Sarah, a late 20-something blonde generic cute girl, married to Josh, wanting to have a baby, writing her thesis on the effects of porn on relationships.  Josh and Sarah notice Dale moving in across the street and bring him a plate of Rainbridge Farm cookies, which Dale creepily asks if they're homemade and then seems pissed off that they're not but accepts them anyway.  We later see Dale working in the grocery store and helping Sarah load her groceries in her car, being as friendly as he possibly can while still looking and acting like a major creepo.  

[Oh yeah and there are about five different scenarios in this movie where Dale eats cookies like a creep, all fast and maniacal, and that alone is worth the price of admission for the sheer WTF level of it all.]

We learn that Sarah had recently been in a bad car accident and had head trauma, resulting in insane night terrors where she sees Josh get killed, finds blood on her sweatshirt, wakes up in different rooms in the house, wakes up naked and smelling cleaning products, and all other varieties of strange scenarios.  Her very pregnant friend and therapist, Leslie, tries to help Sarah through all of her issues while Dale lurks around every corner saying hi to Sarah every chance he can get.

 

Eventually, Sarah starts to get suspicious of Dale and sneaks into his house one day after he leaves for work.  She finds an entire cabinet full of cookies and a box upstairs of keys.  Turns out, Dale made an impression of Sarah's key the same day he loaded the groceries into her car and has been sneaking into her house every night.  But what has he been doing?  Suddenly maybe the night terrors aren't nightmares at all, but reality.  We also learn that Sarah becomes pregnant but Josh shoots blanks, thus causing a giant rift in their marraige as he thinks she has been cheating on him and moves out to his buddy's house.

After months of frustration and fear she is losing her mind, Sarah sets up a smoke detector camera in her bedroom to get to the bottom of what exactly is happening during these night terrors/blackouts.  What she finds is alarming.  Dale has been sneaking into her house every night, tying her up, dancing with her in his arms, eating cookies, raping her, then slitting her throat.  Yes, you read that right.  Dale has been killing Sarah every night, BUT after cleaning up all the blood, before he leaves the room he breathes life back into her and all her wounds are healed yet she remembers nothing.

Turns out all those years ago, Dale's mom didn't actually die because that night Dale discovered his power and brought his mom back to life.  He then went out of control with it and began killing girls and animals all around his neighborhood and bringing them back to life, slowly driving his mother to insanity.  She hung herself, slit her wrists, and tried all other methods to die, but Dale would keep bringing her back to life.  Finally, Dale's mother set herself on fire in front of the police and was sent off to the insane asylum in order to get away from Dale.  Sarah goes to visit her and we learn Dale's back story and why he is the way he is today, including the fact that he is forever stuck in a preteen's mentality and when he first discovered his power, before he would bring people back to life, he would demand his mother make him homemade cookies with milk.

 

Our story comes to a grand conclusion when Sarah returns home prepared to shoot Dale, but finds he has tied up Josh and now their lives are in danger.  Sarah must come up with a plan to get Dale out of their lives for good and let's just say it begins with a cookie date over a wine glass full of milk and ends with, well...I want so badly to spoil the last ten minutes of the movie because it gets EPIC but I will not because I feel this one is much more fun when you don't know what's coming.  I'm also leaving out a couple of key scenes for brevity's sake, but let's just say they involve bunnies and babies.

 

Now, I learned after watching this that Come Back to Me is based on a novel, "The Ressurectionist" by Wrath James White, this BAMF right here:

White is a former World Class Heavyweight Kickboxer, distance runner, performance arist, and former street brawler.  Proof that you can't judge a book by its cover or an author by his snazzy suit and tie.

Once again, I would definitely give Come Back to Me a high approval rating.  Of course it has its cheesy moments and the lead actress is sometimes slightly insufferable with her over the top gasps and facial expressions and shrieking, but I can overlook this because of how well the other actors fit their roles and embody their characters and how this is one of those films where you know something is not quite right but you can't exactly figure out what's happening until it all just smacks you in the face.  Dale is a complex character who does heinous things but you realize deep down inside he's an emotionally-stunted momma's boy with a power he didn't ask for and really has no idea what to do with and, man, he just really likes cookies and milk.

Come Back to Me will make you think twice about whether some of your nightmares are a little more real than you'd like to believe and also make you side-eye that one neighbor who always seems a little too interested in where you're going or what you're doing.  And, hey, who doesn't love a horror movie that leaves you with a lingering sense of paranoia, am I right?  Anyone...? 

- Amanda