Just the Ticket #159: Penny Dreadful (List Lookback)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster,

Giving my two cents.

Penny for your thoughts, Ticketholders!

Believe it or not, there was a time when it was possible to get short-form horror content for a penny. It began in Victorian England (read: over two hundred years ago) with broadsides (essentially small billboards and playbills serving as cautionary tale advertisements) for upcoming executions, and as literacy improved and became more widespread through industrialization, it evolved into crime, thriller, and horror fiction compressed into eight-to-sixteen pages and priced cheaply for mass distribution. Because of the low-cost wood-fiber paper stock they were printed on, these sensationalized publications fell in the category of Pulp Fiction, but for their subject matter and pricing (and more appropriate for this month's List Lookback selection), they were given the derogatory designation of the Penny Dreadful.

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Released from a wrecked car in the woods in 2006, and not to be confused with the 2014 series of the same name (no connection), Penny Dreadful was directed, produced, and co-written by Richard Brandes (the Martial Law and Devil In the Flesh movies, among other direct-to-video action, horror, family, and exploitation thriller films), with cinematography by Joplin Wu (who hasn't done much recognizable work aside from maybe The Watcher, but it's a cool name and he does a good job with the establishing shots, atmosphere, and color choices here, so, yeah; Joplin Wu, everybody...), and starring Rachel Miner (Meg from Supernatural), Mimi Rogers (Hider In the House and Ginger Snaps), and small roles by John Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes and The Crow), Mickey Jones (Home Improvement and Justified), Chad Todhunter (who has over fifty film and television guest credits and a name that makes him sound like a Native American with brainrot who kills beta males named Tod, so, yeah; True Blood's Chad Todhunter, everybody...), and Liz Davies (the original Pet Sematery).

I originally learned about Penny Dreadful during my first year in Washington state, when I bought it (and a large fistful of other horror films) at a Hollywood Video going-out-of-business sale (before it was replaced by an H&R Block office, a Verizon store, and a Pizza Hut - all at once, not in order). In that trip, I became obsessed with collecting and watching the After Dark Horrorfest movies (the original four-year run from 2006, which Penny Dreadful was a part of, to 2010 had all been released to home video by that time, and the final year of the festival wouldn't take place until 2015). I've reviewed some of them here on Just the Ticket (Mulberry Street, Perkins' 14, Hidden 3D, Zombies Of Mass Destruction, and Dying Breed), so give those reviews some love at the links provided when you're done here.

Getting back to Penny Dreadful itself, Miner plays the titular Penny, who is full of dread (also in the title) about cars after her mother died in a crash when she was a child. Following a cool opening credits sequence (hand-drawn in foggy car windows as the camera pans over them and passes through them like it's a Deadite spirit from Evil Dead), Penny is on an exposure therapy road trip with her therapist Orianna (Rogers) to build a snowman in the mountains, "completing the circle" of what she was going to do when she was younger and getting closure for her trauma. Perhaps the most irritating thing is how often Orianna takes her eyes off the road to talk to Penny, and how Penny doesn't bat an eye despite having a debilitating automobile-related trauma. And then there's the part where she sideswipes a woman dressed like the I Know What You Did Last Summer killer (Davies) and offers to give her a ride to an abandoned campground in the dark. Shortly after dropping off the hitchhiker, Orianna and Penny find that their car has been sabotaged, and the usual "splitting up to call for help in a place without cell service in the mid-2000s" cliché happens, leading to Orianna's death and Penny waking up trapped in the car next to Orianna's body.

This is normally where I'd complain about the movie just being Penny whining and crying and screaming in a car for an hour of runtime while the hitchhiker (revealed through dialogue and radio broadcasts to be an escaped mental patient involved in a recent diner massacre offscreen) kills the rest of the small cast (including Jones and Todhunter) but chooses to elaborately torment Penny specifically. And I still will, but not because I think Penny Dreadful is a slow, boring movie. I don't think that. I think that, for a professional-looking but low-budget horror movie, it does something that few slasher movies do, if any: it's a psychological thriller first (making the final girl's character growth and the atmosphere of her circumstances the main source of the horror, with Rachel Miner's acting selling the sympathy and empathy of her character's emotional and psychological state) and a road trip slasher second. Penny's "stupidity," whether it be indecision or just not doing something the audience would think of, never feels like formulaic horror movie stupidity because it is grounded in her fear, as opposed to juvenile self-impairment, genre ignorance, or her character naturally being bad at making decisions. But because Penny is portrayed so well from so many aspects (acting, writing, cinematography, etc.), there is seemingly no room left for making the hitchhiker make sense as a character. On one hand, she's supposed to be this escaped maniac who slaughters people indiscriminately, but on the other hand, she had the malice of forethought to sabotage the car, kill Orianna, knock Penny unconscious, put Orianna's dead body back in the driver's seat (by the way, either the effects team needs props - pun not intended - for creating such a lifelike dummy, or Mimi Rogers deserves accolades for staying almost perfectly still for most of the runtime), wedge the car between two trees so Penny would be literally trapped inside her greatest fear for over eight hours, all the while scaring and torturing her specifically, until the movie's open-ended finale. Therefore, the hitchhiker doesn't make sense as a character. I understand her narrative purpose in Penny's growth (showing her that there are scarier things in the world than cars...unless it's a Tesla), but she could have been left out of the movie altogether or replaced by some other terrifying plot device (because that's really all she is), and Penny Dreadful wouldn't have needed to be all that different.

Speaking of things that aren’t all that different, my opinion of Penny Dreadful (2006) is pretty much the same as it was when I first watched it over ten years ago. Of course, Supernatural has been over for a few years by now, so the first impression reaction of "I thought Rachel Miner only played villains‽" has faded somewhat, but that vibe of terror by commiseration still hits the same, as does the feeling that the chosen slasher villain doesn't quite belong. That third act finale is worth the trip, though; way more emotionally satisfying than building a snowman, even if it is left open to interpretation.

C+

What has clear interpretation, however, is my need for engagement analytics. So please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your two cents at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue so I can have two pennies to rub together, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Out of the car,

But not Out of the woods.