Penny Dreadful (2006)

I love this movie so much

Powerful

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Just so we're clear right from the start, if your idea of a good chiller is to watch a whimpering dimwit huddled in the fetal position in the back seat of a BMW for pretty much the entire film's running time, you'll be over the moon with this awful mess. Not me.So where do I even start? Ah yes, the protagonist, of course. Weak female leads have always frustrated and annoyed me, double that for horror movies and then quadruple that for that weak female lead also being a certifiable imbecile. Penny is the absolute last person you would ever want to cross in a real-world survival scenario. She blubbers, she cries, she screams, she moans, she hurts herself and all while conveniently doing absolutely nothing any rational person would do in a life-or-death situation. Example? Homicidal lunatic following you with your car tire quickly losing pressure? Curl up in a ball and cry. Stuck in a car with a corpse? Make a half dozen mediocre efforts to break the windshield before giving up, curl up in a ball and cry. Helpful stranger runs down homicidal lunatic, you notice lunatic is still alive? Alert helpful stranger? Nope. Curl up in a ball and cry. I was grinding my teeth so hard I may have to go to the dentist and make sure my fillings are still intact.To make matters even more ridiculous (yes, really), Penny decides she's going to continue downing sedatives that leave her virtually catatonic for hours, allowing the lunatic to mess with her each time she wakes from her medically induced comas, somehow surprised that it has happened again each time. I finally really just wanted to see the useless twit die and I was deprived of that joyous moment. If it had been in there, this may have received a "3 out of 10". Alas, it was not to be.The movie itself is fairly standard slasher fare. You've got all the horror-isms like the creepy woods, the dark and stormy night, kids who think they may have heard a noise but then didn't, the obligatory useless flashlight, the creepy voice that is impossibly evil (was that seriously the Predator laughing?) and obviously the sprained ankle because obviously Penny isn't already as useless as an ashtray on a motorbike without being physically impaired on top of things.This mess gets a "2 out of 10" only because Mimi Rogers pulled off her character quite well. Too bad she wasn't around long enough to finally snap and put idiot Penny out of everybody's misery.

WARNING, SPOILER ALERT!! Penny Dreadful really is dreadful. Basically you see Penny spend the whole movie trapped in a car endlessly cowering and crying, while some escaped lunatic tries to terrorize her from outside. The movie spends more time showing her losing her mind then it does showing anything else. After about 30 straight minutes of he panicking and whimpering, it just gets old. I found myself wishing the nut job would just finish her off already! The character was just plain annoying, the plot sucked, and the ending was lame. It took me 3 tries to finish this movie. I don't mind slow build up, but this just builds up to nothing but a waste of time.

Penny Dreadful - another solid proof why you should never, ever ever trust IMDb's rating system. I still haven't figured out how it works, but if this film is rated 5.1 at the moment, then something is definitely messed up. I've barely stopped myself from rating it 10 just to do it justice on behalf of those who did it wrong.Much like the groundbreaking "Saw" and the thriller "Panic Room", Penny Dreadful saved a lot of budget by using an almost single location - and an instant one. In "Saw" it was a deserted public bathroom, and here - a stranded car. How did it work? Beautifully. Not for one second did I get the chance to stop and think "I wish there were some more shooting locations".Let's be fair: the plot is far from original, as we've seen too many films about creepy hitchhikers who turn out to be psycho killers. The ending is as anticlimactic, overused and worn down as they come. But other than that? This film has been spectacular. The exposition and build-up were very original (not a married couple on vacation, not teenagers going to a cabin, but a car-phobic orphan and her therapist!), the acting was profound, and the thrill and anxiety started around 5 minutes into the film and lasted till the final moment.One might think that an entire film portraying a girl locked in a car with a killer tormenting her from the outside would be lacking in content and boring. I might have thought the same before watching this film. Innovative, original and excellently done! Slightly more work on the screenplay could have made it a masterpiece.All in all? One of the best Horror films of 2006, if you haven't watched it yet - stop reading my babble and go watch it!

I was waiting for the suspense. I was waiting for any kind of "unexpected events". I waited for 90 or so minutes. I needn't have bothered. Some people found the dire awfulness of this movie funny. I wasn't even able to enjoy it for that...The movie begins with a vaguely reasonable premise; that this girl is travelling with her psychiatrist to help her finally get past her phobia of cars... But once that has been established, anything you can imagine happening next would be better than what this movie puts you through.-Stop at a gas station. "Help! I'm in a car, I can't carry on. Oh OK, I'll get back in." -Hit a pot-hole (twice). "Help! I'm in a car, I can't carry on! OK OK, let's carry on." -Clip a hitchhiker with the car. "Help! I'm in a car, I'm going to die! Oh OK, let's take the slightly creepy yet apparently harmless victim of hit-and-don't-run and drop them deep in the mountain forest where there's nobody else around. I don't mind" -The car has a flat tyre blatantly caused by harmless raw-meat-eating (but generous to offer to share it. Sweet psycho ^^) silent hitchhiker. "No, don't leave my in this terrifying car by myself to find signal for your phone! Let me take one step away before falling on nothing and spraining my ankle to make this into a -real- horror film!"And so on.There was so little to enjoy, especially as Penny spent so much of the time whimpering or screaming at the slightest noise. Perhaps she can be forgiven a little, as she spent half the movie sitting trapped in the evil car with a decaying Mimi Rogers (refering to her character's lifelessness. Mimi's not that bad), but her tireless stupidity was grating.I'm afraid, as this was even the area where Penny's parents died in the car accident all those years ago, that I was waiting for any kind of linking of the two events. Some kind of mystical correlation that could perhaps explain what happened when she was a wee girly. It never came. I feel robbed. Kinda. Oh well.