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I think it was a good casting choice to cast
an actress in a horror movie who always looks and talks like she’s
glimpsing at the worlds horrifying vision, and no one else can see it
but her. Rachel Miner has that ability. Every movie I’ve ever seen her
in, the girl talks with a quiver almost as if she’s too frightened to
mutter dialogue, while her eyes and eyebrows are instinctively raised at
their highest. Miner is really good to look at, but damn she’s also a
pretty perfect horror heroine/victim. Miner gives an actual good
performance here as the complex and tragic Penny Deerborn, a young girl
who is forced to confront her fear of cars, after picking up a creepy
hitchhiker. Miner manages to hold up her end of the film very
competently, and I sympathized with her paralyzing fear of cars.
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Her tears, her whimpers, and her pleas for
help often kept her from becoming whiny and obnoxious, and
Miner does a great job of playing the helpless victim. The
story of weakness, and evil preying on weakness is ages old,
but with “Penny Dreadful” it worked for me, like a charm.
It’s not only logical, but believable that this young woman
would inadvertently open up to a psycho that would use her
fear to torment her relentlessly. And this is helped by the
fact that Penny is stuck in her car with an unlikely
passenger as her tormentor waits in the darkness. |
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Brandes creates the feeling of vulnerability
and tension well, and makes this car one hell of a terrible torture
device for this young woman. Miner only manages to deliver the concept
with her spot on performance. “Penny Dreadful” is a fun and awfully
creepy cat and mouse thriller that worked mainly because of Miner. And
of course because of Brandes rather frantic direction; Brandes manages
to competently display the sense of confinement and helplessness as we
watch this young girl in a small car with a dead body struggling to find
a way to escape. Stuck in the woods, Brandes doesn’t have much room for
innovation, and yet he pulls it off with flying colors depicting the car
as this young girl’s psychological journey to fend off this beast and
her paralyzing Amaxophobia all at the same time.
In a point of fear, many of us tend to do
stupid things. A pummeling car causes us to freeze in fear, the darkness
makes us stop, and then there are the people in “Penny Dreadful” who
make some pretty stupid movies. One of the stupidest is from Mimi
Rogers’ character that picks up a creepy hitchhiker in the middle of an
extended therapy getaway with her patient Penny. She’s afraid of cars.
Why make such a ridiculous move like that? Meanwhile, “Penny Dreadful”
does wear out its welcome at the seventy minute mark, where Brandes
almost seems to run out of ways to keep the audience watching. With such
a confined setting there really are so many ways to have our tormentor
terrorizing our heroine. The methods of torture are at first morbid, and
then it just becomes monotonous to the point where you’re just waiting
for the resolution to come already.
Brandes’ slick direction matched with Rachel
Miner’s strong performance make “Penny Dreadful” a fun and involving
horror film in the vein of “Cujo,” and shoot me but I had a blast, even
in the face of its caveats.
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