Penny Lane Is Dead
by Hope Madden
It’s 1986 in Australia. Three brand new high school graduates plan to spend the night at Penny Lane’s (Bailey Spalding) grandparents’ empty lake house. Their moms drop them off, and the girls sneak a cigarette and pop down to the liquor store. Those crazies!
But Penny’s disturbed cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn) arrives uninvited with cupcakes so loaded with drugs that Penny passes out. So, Penny’s besties Toni (Tahlee Fereday) and Amy (Alexandra Jensen) throw Kat out.
This seems a fine plan until Kat calls her 40-year-old ex-con boyfriend to pick her up and he shows up with two other felonious pals, all of them with bad intentions.
Writer/director Mia Kate Russell’s feature debut is a weird mix of gritty Ozploitation horror and 80s comedy. The film is at its best when she exhibits her keen instincts for practical gore. Those feet!
But long before things get bloody, the anxiety Russell and her ensemble generate inside the humble little beach house is impressive.
Home invasion horror often delivers a particularly uncomfortable tension, and Russell comes close to Last House on the Left vibes. Ben O’Toole is particularly effective as Angus, a vainglorious low-rent thug delighted to partake in bloody debauchery.
And Penny Lane Is Dead definitely gets bloody. But the violence is of a type that doesn’t fit well with the film’s more broadly brushed humor. The tonal issues are anchored in Wright-Mendelsohn’s character.
The performance itself is very impressive, almost Fairuza Balk a la The Craft at times. Kat, in horror movies actualy made in the 80s, would have been the tragic but cool outsider—Angela from Night of the Demons, Trash from Return of the Living Dead. Sure, she’s chaos walking and her poor decisions bring destruction, but you don’t hate her.
Russell sidesteps that cliché in favor of the unspeakable: the popular girl who looks like a Barbie really is the hero and the messed-up Goth chick really is evil. And for a time, Wright-Mendelsohn (Ben’s daughter) carves out a madness that is deeply unsettling and very impressive.
But Act 3 becomes “pile on the mean girl” and Kat becomes a near-supernatural villain when, honestly, it’s the three men who deserved this level of comeuppance. The vitriol seems misdirected, and paired with a poorly handled sexual assault storyline, Penny Lane Is Dead can’t get out of its own way.
It’s too bad, because there was something here, something unnerving and unwholesome.
