Penny Lane Is Dead

Set in 1986, during a scorching Aussie summer, three best friends' celebration at a beach house turns into a blood-soaked fight for survival when a prank goes horribly wrong.

When you make a movie like this, there are a lot of preconceived notions about it, including popular tropes. This movie upends a lot of those tropes and makes this something quite interesting. By changing how the final girl works and how the main antagonists shifts, it becomes something rather unique and special. It is staged beautifully and acted with conviction. I like this movie a lot. I absolutely recommend it.

Shudder's latest is a chilling Ozploitation flick that has echoes of Peckinpah's **STRAW DOGS** -- with one hell of a depraved twist. **PENNY LANE IS DEAD**, from makeup artist turned writer-director Mia Kate Russell, takes us to the sweltering summer of 1986, where a group of friends has gathered at a family-owned beach cabin to celebrate Penny Lane's (Bailey Spalding) acceptance into university. But the sudden arrival of Penny's estranged cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn) turns the sapphic gathering into a complete nightmare for the girls -- one that will test audiences' limits... Things become exponentially more unhinged when Kat's psychotic boyfriend Angus (Ben O'Toole) and his droog friends show up with a trunk full of drugs. As the full picture of horror comes into focus like a Polaroid photo from hell, the night turns into a fight for survival, with Penny's girlfriend Toni (Tahlee Fereday) fighting back against the increasingly savage acts of violence. O'Toole's Angus menaces and unsettles throughout, but it is Wright-Mendelsohn's performance as the deranged Kat that steals the show, with a descent into depravity rarely executed this well on screen. The 1986 setting is particularly effective, as it refreshingly rules out the use of cell phones, adding an extra layer of anxiety to the characters' limited ability to call for help in Australia's sprawling Outback and further enhancing the film's sense of isolation. As the eventful evening goes completely off the rails, the violence eventually becomes almost numbing to the viewer -- making **PENNY LANE IS DEAD** one of the most disturbing home-invasion horror films I've seen in some time.