Peter Five Eight

Grade: B-

Well, here it is: the guiltiest pleasure of the year. Actually, I should qualify that. Snack Shack is my guiltiest pleasure of the year, but that’s actually a great movie. Peter Five Eight is crap, but it’s the best crap you will see this year. I think we’ve found our new The Room. It’s ridiculous, it’s preposterous, it’s laughably melodramatic, it’s badly made for reasons I will get into…but it’s a scream. It’s a hoot. It’s hilarious. It deserves to be seen, and maybe even be a cult classic, so I guess I gotta give it a “recommended” grade.

You can’t even say “why Kevin Spacey would sign onto this is beyond me,” because we know. Projects like this are the only work he can get these days. This is one of only three movies he’s made in the last seven years. They’ve all been small indie projects and/or filmed overseas. Peter Five Eight started production in September 2021 and finally got released this year. The title is a reference to the Bible verse. 1 Peter 5:8 – “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”

I question whether the filmmakers here were of sober mind. Blood gets on the camera lens after a kill. In some of the laziest ADR I’ve ever seen, the dialogue we hear often doesn’t match what the actors’ mouths are doing. Phone conversations end with “I’m hanging up now.” The film noirish voice-over narration keeps getting in the way of the movie, almost as much as the score does. Our heroine, being pursued by a killer, desperately cries out “Who’s my adversary? WHO’S MY ADVERSARY?!?!”

She is Sam (Jet Jandreau). She lives in a small mountain town, where the population appears to top out at 15 or so. She’s a real estate agent. There’s a subplot where a homophobic neighbor doesn’t want a lesbian couple to move in next door to her. This old woman never actually uses the words “gay” or “lesbian.” She keeps calling them “materialistic.”

But back to Sam. She hasn’t always been Sam. She went by a different name back when she accidentally killed somebody, and fled the scene, and became Sam. She’s an alcoholic. You could say she literally has a drinking problem, because the bottle frequently never touches her lips. She holds it over her open mouth in montages that can only aspire to be as coherent or well-put-together as anything I did on Windows Movie Maker in 2007.

Enter Kevin Spacey as Peter. Charismatic and charming. He buys a house in cash right off the bat – across the street from Sam; not the materialistic couple’s prospective home, if you were wondering. Peter is a hit man, hired to expose Sam’s past. It’s never clear exactly what he plans to do here, but instructions from his boss (who has some sort of connection with the woman Sam killed) are “make her pay” and “make it messy.”

Everything is played for real, without any tangible indication of parody. Spacey has always had a command of the text. He can make words dance. His performance suits the movie, and the banter he has with Rebecca De Mornay includes some real groaners. Nice to see the two of them again. As Sam, Jet Jandreau is putting on at least two characters: the persona she adopts when she’s on the clock trying to sell a house, and how she is at home with her deadbeat husband, while the beer that sloshes in her bottle is as loud as the dialogue. It must take a special kind of talent to not only overact so much, but do so in multiple ways in one film – so I’d like to think Jandreau is a fine actress.

Peter Five Eight is terrible and fails in so many ways, but I can’t write it off. The locations are lovely, and however you feel about Spacey as a person, it’s hard to deny that he is very very good at acting – and it’s great to see him doing it again. It’s so bad, it’s…I can’t bring myself to use the G word, but I was entertained by it, and often howled with laughter. I do think you should see it, but situate your expectations accordingly, and turn your brain off. You truly won’t need it.

Grade: B-