Ferociously Nasty Penny Lane is Dead is an Aussie Exploitation Throwback
In the dog days of a sweltering 1986 Australian summer, Penny Lane (Bailey Spalding) and her best friends Toni (Tahlee Fereday) and Amy (Alexandra Jensen) have her secluded house all to themselves. They’re planning on celebrating her getting into college, and they’ve got an entire weekend to do whatever they want with no one around to keep them on their best behavior.
But what they did not count on is the arrival of Penny’s cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn). While they used to be as close as sisters, now the pair’s relationship is hopelessly strained. Kat is jealous of Penny for any number of unspoken reasons, and she intends to use this weekend get-together as an opportunity to spring a cruel prank.
That’s how writer-director Mia’Kate Russell’s fearless, violently unbalanced pitch-black comedic chiller Penny Lane is Dead begins, and things only get progressively nihilistic and depraved from there. Kat’s disgusting joke is only the starting point. Once she gets kicked out of the house only to return with her unhinged older drug-dealing boyfriend Angus (Ben O’Toole) and his two thuggish compatriots, all bets are off. The whole thing is like some deranged Aussie Ozploitation melding of Funny Games, Revenge, and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Safe to say, this one is not for the faint of heart.
What’s interesting is that, even in purposeful shorthand, amidst all the deranged darkness, immorality, and abhorrent terror, Russell still slips in a delightfully sweet little love story. Penny and Toni are introduced as having been engaged in a clandestine affair for quite some time, and they’re planning on making their coupling official once they get away from this small conservative community and into the progressive safety of collegiate life. Spalding and Fereday have instantaneous chemistry, and the heat that passes between them is sweetly palpable.
Good thing, because Kat’s intrusion happens almost immediately, while Angus’s arrival takes place not too long after that. Russell swings for the fences. Moments of absurdist, almost Monty Python-esque comedy sit precariously alongside sequences of torturous ugliness. No character, not even the sweetest one the screen could ever hope to showcase, is immune from being subjected to sickening abominations. As for Penny, whether she’s truly dead or not is the central mystery; that Angus beats her to a bloody pulp and subsequently rapes her decidedly is not.
This isn’t a spoiler. It’s clear from the moment that Angus enters the picture that this is what he intends to do to Penny. What the audience does need to discover for themselves is how the other characters react to his actions, most notably Kat. Her presence makes the film far more complicated than it initially appears it is going to be. Russell isn’t delivering a straightforward feminist manifesto. Instead, she’s working in murky waters of moral grey, and this is entirely by design.
Not that key elements of the genre are not paid attention to. Fereday proves to be a strong survivor, and her skills with a machete should not be trivialized. The actor showcases a resolute internalized ferocity that took me by surprise. She gives back more than she takes, and her virulent back-and-forth engagements with O’Toole have verbal and physical weight. But this stuff is to be expected. While there are minor variations on the theme (not all of Angus’s crew are quite as accepting of his heinous shenanigans, as is typical for fare like this), for the most part these aspects of the thriller follow a standard playbook.
It’s Kat who proves to be the wildcard. She is the monster that makes all of Russell’s musings about sexual violence and female rage go in an entirely unforeseen direction. Penny’s cousin is broken, but she still has agency. She sees where things are headed and must make a decision as to how far she’s willing to go to allow Angus to follow his murderous agenda all the way through to its completion. How much one is willing to accept her decision and its chilling aftermath is going to go a long way to their deciding if this nasty bit of a home invasion terror is worthy of their time to watch or not. I’m guessing many will choose to look away, walk out, or turn it off.
But I don’t think they should. Wright-Mendelsohn is magnificent. The actor does not shy away from the central abhorrent darkness nosily lurking at the heart of this madness. She’s a maelstrom of physical and emotional momentum, Kat pinwheeling from one extreme to the next as she contemplates where her jealousy of Penny and her former friends is going to take her, leaving her with no other choice than homicidal hysteria. And yet, as irredeemable as her actions are, Wright-Mendelsohn manages to make this spitfire of a demonic abomination almost sympathetic. She’s absolutely extraordinary.
Not all of this one works, and the wild shifts in tone from ghoulishly nasty comedy to exploitation horror can be discombobulating. Additionally, one death hit me as much too cruel, even for this genre, and for a brief moment I almost turned completely against Russell’s feature-length debut to the point I considered not watching the rest of the film — and I watch everything, no matter how awful, to the end. This, again, leads me to believe many in the audience won’t be nearly as forgiving.
While you should know going in what Penny Lane is Dead is going to show you, I say stick with this one, no matter how uncomfortable the experience of watching may prove to be. Russell has real storytelling talent, and she’s packed her horror throwback with signature moments I’ll be pondering for quite some time. Most of all, she’s got Wright-Mendelsohn. Her titanic arrival as Kat is worthy of euphoric applause, and I cannot wait to see what she’s going to do next.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
