Mia’Kate Russell’s Ozploitation throwback “Penny Lane Is Dead,” premiering at Fantasia Fest this week before landing on Shudder in August, bundles buckets of practical gore with a sapphic punk-horror vision as riveting as it is disquieting to watch.
Set in 1986, “Penny Lane” follows a quartet of young women celebrating their last days before college at an Australian beach house: the titular Penny (Bailey Spalding), a popular girl celebrating her first discreetly lesbian romance; her childhood friend and new lover, Toni (Tahlee Faraday), and the fragile Amy (Alexandra Jensen), who still holds onto a stuffy for emotional support. Then, forebodingly, there’s Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn, daughter of Ben), Penny’s brooding, chaotic cousin who loathes Penny for reasons that seem merely petty and vindictive.
So she arrives with four cupcakes, each with their names on it (well, ‘dog,’ ‘fat,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘Kat’); Penny’s is spiked with crushed-up pills, and immediately sets about making the other girls uncomfortable while her cousin lies unconscious on the couch. When she’s summarily kicked out of the house, Kat decides to call on her toxic, older, unstable boyfriend, Angus (Ben O’Toole), who arrives with a couple of sleazoids on their way to an unspecified drug drop. These blokes are bad news, and they’re very clearly willing to kill far more than the vibes.
From there, “Penny Lane” escalates quickly into the kind of bad-time B-movie bloodfest that, ostensibly, should thrill horror hounds. And granted, Russell’s direction is stylish and effective, the practical gore effects are tremendously wince-worthy (including one cut that will get you right in the ankles), and the soundtrack is a bogan’s row of Aussie ’80s rock and pop tracks like “Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again” by The Angels.
But as “Lane”‘s stakes grow towards the finality implied by its title, it becomes hard to differentiate Russell’s critiques of male violence towards women from its mere depiction. Sexual assault is a tricky needle to thread in films as tonally playful as this, and you need to have a delicate hand. Russell, instead, jabs the needle in our palm and calls the pain critique. There’s a splash of “Funny Games” here, a home invasion thriller in which there is little to no hope for its protagonists, and horror is found in the inescapability of our villain’s sociopathy. Wright-Mendelsohn shows glimmers of her dad’s wild-eyed range in her performance, which is so unpredictable as to be both scary and occasionally miscalibrated. At times, we understand her as the toxic, spurned mean girl who falls in with the wrong crowd just so she can be loved. As the final act comes roaring in, however, Kat gets broken down into a pathetic, one-note villainess who operates on pure, spiteful impulse. A valid approach, granted, and Wright-Mendelsohn is a literal scream in the role. But it does feel weird to pin so much of the film’s sins on her by the end, when male-on-female violence is the order of the day for the rest of the runtime.
The other performances feel well-calibrated to the insanity on display; Faraday displays the kind of butch resolve that works for an action-heavy role like this, giving Gina Gershon in “Bound” in all its gritted-teeth protectiveness. O’Toole is suitably outsized as a bleach-blonde punk with daddy issues and no small amount of sociopathic rage—he seems the kind of lad who pulled the tails off dogs as a kid and never quite grew out of the instinct. As Angus’ goon Rodowsky, Fletcher Humphrys sneers and gurns, all denim-clad Aussie id.
“Penny Lane” also wants to make us laugh as much as wince, and it’s hard to really invest in the wry tone Russell keeps pulling us back to when one horrifying thing after another happens to yet another gormless innocent. Granted, that’s the calculus this kind of genre film delights in: We’re supposed to cringe and wince at bad things happening to good people, and maybe cheer in the moments where the baddies get their comeuppance. But the road is paved with all manner of indignities that are too innumerable to discuss here (sexual assault is discussed and implied far more cavalierly than the film’s tone merits). The final-girl rampage of the final act is occasionally cathartic—we’ll leave you to guess who ends up wielding a machete and a cheese grater with expert skill—but it feels too little, too nasty, too late.
Someone in our screening passed out; an EMT had to come in and take care of them, while the movie played on gleefully. Props to the film for having that visceral effect (the sound design is suitably queasy, from the bubbling of a bong to the squeak of Angus’ leather pants), but it’s hard to determine just how worth it all that pain and anguish truly was. If this felt a little more sophisticated about the violence inflicted on women’s bodies (of which there is a lot, even and especially from other women), it’d be easier to lean into its squirminess. Instead, this feels like having its rape-revenge cupcake and eating it too.
This review was filed from the Fantasia Fest premiere. It drops on Shudder on August 28.
