By Steve Biodrowski

PENNY DREADFUL is an enjoyable combination of psycho-thriller and slasher horror, which somehow achieves a slick, Hollywood-calibre visual style in spite of its modest budget. The film is not afraid to deliver gruesome horror, but it also dwells on the suspense, offering a tense situation featuring a vulnerable character trapped in a terrible predicament guaranteed to induce nail-biting in the audience – when they’re not leaping out of their seats at the shocks.

The story follows Penny Dearborn (Rachel Miner), a young woman who suffers from a phobia of automobiles ever since she survived an auto accident that killed her family, leaving her an orphan. Her therapist Orianna (Mimi Rogers) drives Penny on a long trip to the scene of the accident. Unfortunately, this confrontational therapy is sidetracked when Orianna's car hits a pedestrian on a lonely, isolated road. The victim – who seems more than a little sinister – survives, hitching a ride with Penny and Orianna to a closed-down camp in the woods. The car breaks down; the therapist goes looking for help, and eventually Penny finds herself trapped inside the automobile when the hitchhiker turns out to be a homicidal lunatic, recently escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane.

The story’s narrative is built around a simple but effective conceit: Penny is afraid of automobiles, but dreadful circumstances force her to take refuge in one. As the lurking maniac wrecks havoc, the car becomes both protection and prison, forcing her to overcome her phobia in a way that her therapy never achieved. (In effect, the film attempts to do for automobiles what Alfred Hitchcock did for the shower in PSYCHO.)

By basing the premise on the protagonist’s mental flaw, the script moves beyond simple slasher mechanics to become something closer to a sophisticated psychological thriller. Beyond that, Penny’s phobia provides a foundation for an impressive array of visual stylings intended to convey her traumatized state of mind, essentially putting the audience inside her head.

The film is also something of a formal experiment, vaguely akin to Hitchcock’s 1930s melodrama LIFEBOAT. In this case, the question is: Can director Richard Brandes visually sustain a movie that takes place mostly within the confined space of the car?

The answer is a resounding yes. The claustrophobia enhances the tension without ever making the film seem limited or cramped, and the camera angles and editing manage to convey a sense of forward narrative momentum and discrete scenes, even though we are mostly looking at the same limited location over and over again. And it’s all wrapped in some gorgeous cinematography that makes clever use of gels and post-production tinkering to create a subtly shifting color scheme keyed to the increasing tension.

Unfortunately, the film does not quite have the courage of its convictions. There are several mostly gratuitous scenes involving a trio of nearby characters: two night watchmen and a woman with whom one is having an affair. This provides ample opportunity for some backseat sex and nudity, not to mention three more victims, but their presence contributes little to the story, except acting as a red herring: will one of them help Penny out of her predicament, or will they all just die?

As a result, the gradually tightening screws of tension are periodically hammered with some hardcore violence that seems rigged for viewers too impatient to sit through a slow build-up. Also, the film succumbs to some of the other tired tropes of the slasher genre: there’s a surprising but ultimately irrelevant twist about the killer’s identity, and there’s even one of those “it’s not really over” endings.

Despite this slasher sensibility lurking around the edges of the narrative, the film remains a character piece that rises to meet the challenge of its unusual premise: how do you keep the protagonist interesting when she is trapped in a car with no one else to relate to? As Orianna (whose tough-love approach makes her seem more like a disappointed mom than a therapist), Mimi Rogers lends star value and delivers a convincing performance with a rather unusual requirement in the later portions of the film. It’s probably not the sort of thing actors normally dream of achieving, but it is utterly convincing, and without it, the film simply would not work.

Nevertheless, PENNY DREADFUL is ultimately a showcase for young Rachel Miner. Her performance helps lift the movie several slices above the standard slasher fare, as her character runs through the gamut of fear and desperation, slowly slouching toward some desperate kind of resilience or determination without ever morphing into the cliché of the kick-ass, unbeatable heroine, so beloved of genre filmmakers ever since Ripley in ALIEN and Sarah Connor in THE TERMINATOR.

In many horror films, the emphasis falls primarily on the monster or the mad killer, whose predations drive the action. PENNY DREADFUL keeps its camera focused on the title character and her plight, building audience identification in a way that creates genuine suspense rather than just simple shocks. The minor concessions to the presumed low-brow expectations of the horror audience may prevent the film from realizing the full potential of its Hitchcockian ambitions, but they don’t diminish its undeniable effectiveness as an exciting chiller. The film is cleverly gauged to be intensely frightening without becoming off-putting; the shocks and surprises are served up with a gusto that energizes the audience, who eagerly go along for the thrill ride, resulting in an experience that is genuinely crowd-pleasing.

TRIVIA

PENNY DREADFUL took home the award for Best Cinematography at the September 2006 edition of the Shriekfest film festival in Hollywood – an honor that was richly deserved.

RELATED ARTICLES: Interview - Director Richard Brandes on PENNY DREADFUL's appearance as part of After Dark: 8 Films to Die For.