One of the 'Eight Films To Die For' (essentially a mini-horror movie festival put on by Lion's Gate and After Dark), Richard Brandes' Penny Dreadful is an interesting experimental take on the backwoods horror/slasher sub-genre that ultimately stretches itself a bit too thin to really work.

When the movie begins, a teenage girl named Penny Dearborn (Rachel Miner who had a small role in The Black Dahlia but who could be poised for bigger things...) is driving into the woods with her therapist, an author named Orianna Volker (former Playmate and former Mrs. Tom Cruise, Mimi Rogers) who has published a book on how to conquer your fears. It seems that when Penny was younger, her family had a horrible accident that took the lives of her mother and father and left her extremely frightened of being in a car. After they stop to get gas (watch for a nifty cameo from The Hills Have Eyes' Michael Berryman as the gas station guy), they take a remote road into the wooded hills as the sun begins to set.

Penny, worried about the drive, has taken some medication unbeknownst to Orianna and when Orianna finds out what she's done, she and Penny start to argue. As they're debating things, the car hits a hitchhiker who is standing on the side of the road. Orianna gets out of the car to see if the person (Liz Davies) is okay, and she offers to drive the poor woman to the nearby camp where she was headed. For the rest of the trip, this person says nothing, through she is kind enough to offer Orianna and Penny a bit of the meat that she has on the end of a skewer. They drop the hitchhiker off at the camp even though it looks like it's closed, and after some erratic behavior, high tail it out of there along the rugged dirt road back to the main highway. Of course, they get a flat and find themselves stuck in the woods. Orianna goes out to find help, Penny stays with the car, and the hitchhiker turns out to be a lunatic and soon enough she's found our two heroines and starts doing her thing. Meanwhile, a guy named Alvin (Chad Todhunter) is having an affair with a woman named Mary (Tammy Filor), and they tend to meet near where Penny is trapped despite warnings from Chad's boss, a guy named Eddie (Mickey Jones). Soon Penny will have to face her fears whether she wants to or not, and this time around she might not have Orianna or anyone else to help her along.

For a film that is set primarily in one location – a car - , Penny Dreadful has a decent amount of suspense going for it. Unfortunately, that same quality is its downfall and what starts off as a neat gimmick soon gets tired and turns into 'girl freaking out in a car for an hour' with the occasional grisly kill scene thrown in to keep us marginally interested. That's the film's fatal flaw – it's simply too long for its concept. This would have made for a strong episode of The Masters Of Horror, as trimming the story down to an hour or so would have made it much tighter and it wouldn't have over stayed its welcome. The film tries to throw some interesting ideas in the mix, and it works few times and fails a few more, but it's not quite enough to make this one as interesting or as tense as it probably wanted to be.

That being said, Rachel Minor is actually quite good in the lead. She's believable and likeable enough that we want her to make it out alive and she does a good job with both the 'scream and be scared' bits as well as the more dramatic moments such as some of the discussions that occur between her and Rogers. Though Mimi Rogers isn't really in the movie as much as Minor is, she's decent too and she makes for a well cast therapist bringing a little bit of condescension to her character that portrays her as more scholarly than compassionate. As the killer, Liz Davis has a few intimidating moments but spends most of the film covered in a long coat with a big hood and looking a little too much like something out of I Know What You Did Last Summer. The killer in this film is completely interchangeable; the film does nothing to differentiate this antagonist from plenty of other similar on screen murderers. The same can be said of the supporting cast, they're very much fodder, existing only to show up and die at the right time.

To director Brandes' credit, Penny Dreadful does look quite good. The camera captures the shadows and the eeriness of the woods at night fairly effectively and a few Carpenter-esque angles and camera tricks make things spookier than they should be. It's just a shame that the interesting concept is quite simply dragged on far too long, as the movie plods along too slowly to be as effective as it could have been.

Video:

Penny Dreadful arrives on DVD in a nice 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that looks to be the proper aspect ratio for the film as the compositions all look to be completely intact. As far as the quality of the picture goes, there's little to complain about here. This is a very dark film as almost all of it takes place during the night and outdoors where there aren't any streetlights or houselights to brighten things up, so it's to Lion's Gate's credit that they got the black levels right for this transfer as if they hadn't the whole thing would have been botched. Some fine detail gets a little lost in a few scenes but aside from that there's little to complain about here. Mpeg compression artifacts are a non-issue and there are no problems with heavy edge enhancement and only some mild aliasing to note.