Rachel Nichols is locked in a parking garage on Christmas Eve—and not alone—in P2.
least Warners slapped an afford- able SRP ($12.98) on the disc, which can be bettered online for as little as $7.99.
P2
2007, Summit Entertainment, DD-5.1/MA/16:9/LB/ST/+, $26.99, 97m 14s, DVD-1 By Richard Harland Smith
Even including such sub-
genre classics as THE COLLEC- TOR (1965) and MISERY (1990), hostage scenarios invariably run into a lull at the halfway point, between the abduction and awk- ward introductions (often cen- tered around an uncomfortable meal) and the inevitable last act reckoning, in which the captive flips the script on his or her cap- tor. P2 does its best to avoid second act doldrums by keep- ing its players on their feet for some well-edited cat-and-mouse action, and with a gruesome tor- ture slaying, but the result is shopworn, right down to the villain’s comeuppance for the sin of using language inappropriate
for the office. While Rachel Nichols (THE WOODS) is a re- spect-worthy heroine who makes (as best she can, given that she’s handcuffed and forced into a low-cut evening gown) intelligent decisions, but Simon Bentley (GHOST RIDER) fails to enliven his underwritten role of a lonely Manhattan parking ga- rage attendant who loves neither wisely nor well. Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre (Haute Ten- sion) photographs the subter- ranean setting with a keen eye for Hopperesque urban alien- ation, but the package still feels resolutely generic and small. P2 looks very fine on this DVD release from Summit En- tertainment. The anamorphic 2.35:1 transfer preserves the film’s canny juxtaposing of can- died Yuletide chromatics with the sickly monochrome wash of its bunker-like setting and the Dolby 5.1 track is nicely bal- anced for both soft passages and cacophonous outbursts. Extras run to the expected pushing-the- product puff pieces (including
two making-of featurettes and a theatrical trailer), in addition to an audio commentary shared by first time director Franck Khalfoun and writer/producers Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur. These men seem amiable and well-schooled in their love of the genre, but their dogged insistence that they’ve taken terror to an all-new level with this competent but thor- oughly mediocre effort makes them sound even crazier than that wacko down on P2.
PHASE IV
1974, Legend Films, DD-1.0/16:9, $9.95, 83m 14s, DVD-1 By Bill Cooke
This unusual offering in the ecological-horror trend of the Seventies is additionally curious for being the only feature film ever directed by legendary title- sequence designer Saul Bass (PSYCHO, SPARTACUS). As in THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, sci- entists huddle inside a remote
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