P2

Saturday, April 26, 2008

I never saw the first P, so I'm not sure I followed all of this one.

Just kidding, this isn't a sequel, it's just a terrible title for a pretty enjoyable horror movie. The trailer made it look rather skippable, but then I found out that the Hills Have Eyes remake guy cowrote it, and Roger Ebert gave it a good review, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

P2 actually aims to generate some real suspense, so it's more along the lines of a thriller, but with some definite slasher movie elements thrown in. On one hand, it's a little classier and better made that others of it's ilk, but it's still not afriad to throw in some extreme gore. I quite like that balance.

By far the film's biggest asset is Wes Bentley, who plays the killer. Like I was saying about Jonathan Tucker in The Ruins, it's nice seeing a good actor doing good work in this genre. Bentley is very effectively unnerving in this, but he also manages to avoid making his psycho into a one-dimensional Jason Vorhees, and instead fleshes him out into lonely, violent weirdo with recognizable motivations. He's at least 2 1/2 dimensional.

I didn't know this going in, but P2 has a Christmas theme to it. Not in a gimmicky way like Silent Night Deadly Night or the remake of Black Christmas. It's more like the old Black Christmas, where it does add a little atmosphere, but mostly is used as a plot device to explain why no one is around. It does get a little gimmicky here and there, most memorably during the end credits, which shows of montage of holiday-style snapshots of all the awful things that happened during the movie, set to Christmas movie. That was hilarious, but I'm glad that the rest of the movie didn't have that silly, darkly comic attitude to it (at least, not to that degree). The killer does briefly dress as Santa Claus (in one of the best, strangest scenes in the film), but he doesn't kill or stalk any body in the Santa costume or make bad puns about being on his naughty list. It's a classier movie than that.