Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter P

Panic Room (2002) A divorced woman buys a vast brownstone house in Manhatten for herself and her appalling daughter. The house has a panic room; its castle keep; where the occupants can take refuge when bad guys break in. Only when it happens on their first night in the house, the bad guys include a guy from the security company, who builds panic rooms,and they expected to find the house empty. Their target is $3 million stashed in the panic room.
   Mom & her kid hit the panic room one-quarter of the way into the film. The phone in there isn't connected. The security guy drills into the ventilation system and connects a propane cylinder to it. Mom sets fire to the gas and damages one of the BGs. The kid tries sending an SOS through a pipe leading to the wet, dark night, but a neighbour across the street just draws her curtains. Hey, this is New York!
   Mom sneaks out to get her mobile, which won't work in the steel-lined panic room. She manages to tap into the landline and makes a brief call to her ex-husband before being cut off. The kid starts going diabetic, the BGs start falling out over money and dad, who's called the cops, just turns up without waiting for them and gets the crap beaten out of him.
   Mom sneaks out again to get insulin. The BGs find the panic room open and 2 of them end up inside with the kid while mom is outside with the gun. The security guy gives the kid a shot of insulin then he gets to work on cracking the safe. The cops eventually turn up so mom has to send them away. The security guy finds $22M in bearer bonds in the safe!
   Lots of sneaking about in semi-darkness as the BGs try to escape. Useless dad makes a bog of shooting a crippled BG but the security guy comes back to finish the gang leader off. Which means that he starts climbing a wall again as the cops arrive, so he's busted. The film ends with mom and the kid looking for somewhere else to live as mom and the BGs wrecked the panic room house.

Patriot Games (1992) is based on the Tom Clancy novel featuring Prof. Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford). He's in London with his family when Irish terrorists try to kill the Queen's cousin, who's a government minister. Ryan crashes in and kills the brother of Miller, a scumbag killer (Sean Bean), who's arrested.
Of course, the scumbag is sprung from prison transport and he makes Ryan his target instead of the Royal, whom his fellow scumbags want to kidnap for ransom. The Minister has a traitor in his camp. The scumbag goes after the pregnant Dr. Ryan and her young daughter as Jack is surviving his own assassination attempt. Mrs. Ryan and the kid get a free trip to the ER and Ryan rejoins the CIA.
Ryan tracks Miller to a training camp in Libya. Shock, horror! The traitor is Capt. Hastings, Hercule Poirot's sidekick. The camp is Libya is taken out but the main bad guys are long gone. They attack Ryan's home in a storm when the Royal is there. Lots of shooting, the kidnap plan flops and Miller & his crew end up kilt. Hooray!

Payback (1999) is a curiously bleached film, which is mainly blue and white rather than colour, and features Mel Gibson as Porter, a crook who is shot by his wife after he and Reznik, a fellow crook, after stealing $140K from some Chinese gangsters. 5 months later, Porter goes after what he's owed. His junkie ex-wife dies of an overdose. Porter finds Rosie, a hooker for whom he used to drive, and she tells him where to find Reznik.
Reznik owed the local Mob 130 grand; Porter want 70 grand as his half-share from the robbery. Reznik, who likes being beaten up by a Chinese hooker, goes to the mob for help but doesn't get any. So he rats Porter to the Chinese gangsters who were robbed. 2 bent cops save Porter from the Chinese and Porter kills Reznik. Then he goes after Reznik's bosses, Carter & Fairfax, and their boss, Bronson. They put a bomb in his bed! So Porter kills the hitmen and goes after Carter.
After whacking Carter, Porter frames the bent cops for Reznik's murder and kidnaps Bronson's son. Fairfax's goons grab Porter after a shoot-out with the Chinese gangsters and he gets a couple of toes hammered before telling Bronson where his son is. But Porter has set a trap with the bed-bomb and all the bad guys are blown up. And at the end, Porter heads off to Canada with 130 grand because the bad guys didn't believe he wanted only 70 grand.

The Peacekeeper (1997) stars Dolph Lundgren as Major Frank Cross and Roy Scheider as the President. An air force major does an unauthorized food drop to the Kurds and ends up carrying the President's black bag of nuclear codes to make himself unavailable for court martial. Bad guys steal the case while the President is enjoying a night with his bimbo. Cross goes after them. He has to jump a taxi from building roof to roof to roof and takes the place of one of the bad guys on their helicopter.
   Cross ends up at a missile silo, where a gang of bad guys are hoping for $500 million and a plane. Cross teams up with the colonel in charge to cause havoc. The President is dragged away from his bimbo to be told that a nuke from the silo has taken out Mount Rushmore and Col. Murphy, with whom he has history, wants to talk to him.
   When in the army, the President had Murphy's mission to kill Saddam Hussein after the First Gulf War wiped out by US forces. He's dismayed to hear that Murphy isn't dead. He's even more unhappy when Murphy tells him to shoot himself on TV or Washington gets a nuke.
   The President pulls the trigger, but the gun's empty. Cross is almost fried when a missile is launched at Washington. Murphy double-crosses the President and dies laughing. But Cross and the colonel make the missile self-destruct using the black bag.

The Peacemaker (1997) features George Clooney as Colonel Thomas Devoe, a gung-ho Special Forces man, and Nicole Kidman as Dr. Julia Kelly, a nerdy boffin. Russian troops attack a train carrying 10 nuclear warheads heading for decommissioning, blow one up to cover their trail and stroll off with the remaining 9. Dr. Kelly views satellite images and tells her bosses that the train crash was staged.
   Devoe and Kelly head for Vienna to find out how the missiles will be transported to their customer and they have a car chase with lots of mayhem in Vienna. Another satellite locates the ambulance carrying the warhead and Devoe gets to ride into hostile Russian territory in a helicopter. Fun and games at a bridge recover 8 warheads but the nuclear core of the 9th has already been removed by a back-packing terrorist.
   The bomb's destination is Bosnia at the at the time when the Serbs, Croats and Moslems were busy with their respective ethnic cleansing campaigns. The Serb customer is planning to make a nuclear protest at the UN in New York because he blames the West for not letting his people keep on killing until they get sick of it and stop of their own accord.
   Another chase through grid-locked New York before the Serb takes refuge in a church with the activated bomb. Dr. Kelly prevents a nuclear explosion by knocking hell out of the array of conventional explosives around the plutonium core with the butt of Devoe's gun!

Phone Booth (2002) A PR guy is trapped in a New York phone booth at 53rd & 8th, which he uses regularly, after a guy tries, and fails, to deliver a pizza to him. Someone who knows a hell of a lot about him phones the booth and tells him not to leave, or else. The voice sounds like a mixture of Vincent Price and Hal 9000. Stuart is told that he'll be killed if he hangs up. Meanwhile, a bunch of hookers and a bouncer start harassing Stu for the use of the phone booth.
   Stu tries to buy them off then the voice shoots the bouncer. The cops turn up and the hookers tell them that Stu has a gun. A black police captain tries to negotiate with Stu, who finds himself in more trouble when his wife and his friend Pam arrive separately and provide the voice with more potential targets.
   The voice keeps telling Stu to get a gun which he has hidden in the phone booth. Stu uses his cell phone to call his wife and let the Captain know about the real killer. Then he steps out of the booth brandishing the gun.
   Stu is shot and the killer cuts his own throat just before the police arrive? But really, the cops put Stu on his back with a type of baton round. And the killer is the guy who tried to deliver the pizza? All very convenient, and while he's lying flat on his back in a daze in an ambulance, the killer lets Stu know that he's still around and still watching him.

Pit and the Pendulum, The is a long way from the Vincent Price film of the 1960s. The comedy is there but combined with lots of blood and pain. At the beginning, the evil Inquisitor Torquemada has a body removed from its stone coffin, whipped until it falls apart and the bones ground up to make a giant egg-timer. His reason for doing all this is so that the deceased can be condemned as a heretic and all property confiscated from his heirs. Then a couple of little people, a baker and his wife, fall foul of the Inqusitor at the execution of the wife of the ground-up deceased.
   The wife pays the executioner to strangle her before her body is burned at the stake, and a very painful, mouth-frothing business it is. Oliver Reed makes a brief appearance as a Papal messenger sent to tell Torquemada to pack in his torture and killings. Mr. Reed receives a mug of Amontillado before being walled up.
   Torquemada assaults the baker's wife in his castle then he cuts her tongue out with a pair of scissors so that she can't talk about it. An old witch in her cell puts her into a trance and the lady wakes up in a stone coffin – prematurely buried. The same witch eats a load of gunpowder while she is waiting to be burned at the stake and goes up in a huge explosion with her flying bones stabbing the executioner to death.
   Torquemada then shows the baker his new toy – the razor sharp pendulum, which swings above the lid on a pit filled with spikes. Once the abundant rats have gnawed through his ropes, the baker demolishes half of the castle's guards and the Inquisitor ends up falling into the pit and being well spiked.
   Watching this film, knowing that there is real history behind the comedy, and recalling the events in the United States on September 11th 2001, I came to the conclusion that religion should be outlawed in any civilized society.

Pitch Black (2000) A spaceship chucks its crew out of stasis, the captain is dead and it's heading for a crash on a desert planet. But the pilot manages to make a landing of sorts after trying, and failing, to eject the passengers. There's a psychopathic prisoner among the survivors, which include Vala from Stargate SG-1, Series 9. The planet has 3 suns so there's no night. 'Trees' on the horizon turn out to be the skeleton of a vast creature.
   A scouting party comes across an abandoned geological survey camp. Something rips one of the survivors to bits and Riddick, the psycho, is captured. He can see in the dark and he says there's something else to worry about other than him. The lady pilot finds that he's talking about things lurking underground, so Junkie John, the self-appointed sheriff, invites Riddick to help with the attempt to escape from the planet.
   There's a shuttle at the camp but it need power packs. The Arab kid is eaten by flying monsters which live in the dark. The geologists at the camp were killed 22 years earlier, and an orrery found there shows that the 3 suns go into total eclipse behind a Jupiter-like planet every 22 years. And that's when the planet's evil creatures come out to chomp everything living, including one another.
   John is planning to renege on his deal with Riddick. The eclipse starts, the things come out to play and Vala is written off. The rest are trapped in the wreck of their ship. They set off to the camp with power packs for the shuttle, protected by some lights to keep the creatures off them. So the wine merchant screws up the lights and gets eaten. John becomes monster-munch after a fight with Riddick.
   Rain starts bucketing as the survivors are using lamps made from bottles of spirits. Riddick stashes the others and carries on to the shuttle with the power packs. The others find luminescent bugs and fill bottles with them as substitute lamps. And by the time the shuttle takes off, the party of survivors had been reduced, conveniently, to the number which the shuttle can carry.

Polar Storm (2009) Comet Copernicus did a drive-by of the Earth and a bit came off and did a Tunguska in Alaska. The comet was also supposed to have a humungous magnetic field, which totally trashed Earth's! Dr. James Mayfield got some data in Alaska and returned home in time for an earthquake. Then he found that the US government had classified his data to stop anyone finding out what was going on.
   The Sun was in the wrong place and sun dials no longer worked. It looked like the Earth's magnetic field was about to be switched off. James was kidnapped by his dad, a general, who thought he was a security risk and a danger to the cover-up.
   The ground started cracking up and polar auroras began wiping out everything electronic and nearby human beings. James' 2nd wife disappeared into a crack but the stroppy teenage son fished her out. James came up with a nuclear solution but an EM pulse wiped out the USAF bomber.
   Mrs. Mayfield was stuck in a place of danger controlled by dickhead soldiers, so she staged a gaol break and survived. James was told that an obsolete Russian sub could deliver his nuclear strike, but it would be a suicide mission. But James got the sub to hide in an underwater volcano to evade the blast wave and with one bound, the Earth was saved!

Predator (1987) got 4 stars in Radio Times. Featuring Big Arnie, the plot concerns a bunch of total misfits, who are allegedly a crack special operations team, who get suckered into a bogus rescue mission by the CIA. Only they end up in an area where an alien is living. And this alien is an efficient killing machine with gadgets which provide chameleon-like camouflage. Not even ex-wrestler turned Governor of Minnesota, Jesse 'The Body' Ventura blasting away with a GE Minigun (of the sort normally fitted to helicopter gunships) can take the alien out. No, it is all down to Big Arnie and Vietnam War-style jungle booby traps in the end.

Premonition (2004) Chechens in President Bush masks raid a medical facility and steal radio-cobalt sources, pretending to animal rights nutters. 2 cops interrupt the getaway, one of them doesn't survive a crash and Det. Jack Barnes has to be jump-started with an electric shock machine. He starts having visions and one of the Chechens tries to kill him in hospital even though he doesn't remember anything.
   Barnes starts preparing for an earthquake, which happens! A couple of tossers from the FBI patronize him then he has a vision of a train crash. His wife thinks he's day-dreaming until she sees a report on the kitchen TV. A bloke called Vargas is following Barnes because he's been having visions about him.
   Barnes has a vision of a big bang. The Chechens are planning to set off a cobalt-60 dirty bomb to kill people for a reason with which the audience is never troubled. Barnes rousts a thief, who is killed by the Chechens, which confirms suspicions of the FBI jerks that he's involved in something criminal.
   Vargas joins Barnes and there's a gas explosion at a power station. Barnes cracks the cobalt connection but all the Feds want to do is bust him. The Chechens snatch his kid. Vargas was the guy in the helicopter. Barnes has a vision involving his son and the dirty bomb. He and Vargas get into a shoot-out with the Chechens, Barnes takes out the leader and the Feds get him, his kid and the cobalt off the roof of a building (by helicopter) before the building explodes.

Prince Valiant (1954) is a thoroughly daft Hollywood epic full of bad history and worse haircuts. The Black Knight tries to recruit a bunch of Vikings (in horned helmets so you know they're Vikings) to take out King Arthur. But he's foiled by Prince Valiant, another Viking, who's serving as a squire to Sir Gawain. The action includes a tournament, a storming of a castle, a duel between the Black Knight and Prince Violent, and the prince being knighted at the end.

Pterodactyl (2005) An earthquake at a volcano in Turkey near the Armenian border shook loose some eggs, which hatched out pterodactyls! A professor, his assistant and 4 dorkish students headed for the volcano to look for fossils, not knowing they were heading for an area where US troops were hunting terrorists.
The expedition, terrorists, pterodactyls and troops collided and the troops ended up with the terrorist leader and the survivors from the expedition. The professor's girlfriend was dropped into a nest with baby pterodactyls, where she found a radio. More clashes with apparently bullet-proof pteros wiped out most of the party and the head terrorist became exploding lunch for the babies.
It all came down to the prof., his girlfriend and the alpha-male ptero before a smart missile finally found its target. And there were more monsters coming out of the volcano's lower reaches at the end!