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Penance
USA 2009
produced by
William Clevinger, Michael Wormser, Micah Goldman, Jake Kennedy, Demian Lichtenstein (executive) for Clever Worm Entertainment
directed by Jake Kennedy
starring Marieh Delfino, Graham McTavish, Alice Amter, Jason Connery, Valorie Hubbard, Lochlyn Munro, Allison Lange, Michael Rooker, Tony Todd, James Duval, Eve Mauro, Sita Young, Katherine Randolph, Garrett Jones, Tracy Coogan, Morann Peri, Alexis Wolfe, Chris Ivan Cevic, Nathalie Walker, Jake Kennedy, Griffin Kohout, Jose Acevedo, Andrew Graves, Raymond Lee, Lyndsey Wegner
written by Jake Kennedy, music by Ryan Dodson
review by
Mike Haberfelner
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Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
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To pay the medical bills of her ailing daughter, Amelia (Marieh
Delfino) has become a (reluctant) stripper, and when her stripper friend
Suzy (Eve Mauro) is forced to pull out of an extremely well-paying yet
mysterious assignment, she's glad to take over, but brings along her
camera-carrying boyfriend Will (Garrett Jones) for protection. After the
show that goes reasonably well though, Amelia is drugged and Will is shot
dead ... and when she comes to, Amelia finds herself in some sort of
private women's prison, run by religious fanatic Geeves (Graham McTavish), who
just loves to torture women he thinks have sinned - like strippers -
seeing himself as their saviour. Amelia
is given a chance to escape, but what does she do? She picks up her
boyfriend's camera (which was inexplicably left with her) and makes a
documentary (I know this doesn't make sense). She is of course captured by
Geeves and his team (who by the way also have cameras to make
documentaries for some inexplicable reasons) and tortured some more, way
more actually (including genital mutilation), until she claims to be
purified by Geeves' education techniques and says she's ready for her last
test before being released - but she has previously hidden a weapon in the
interrogation room the test is to be conducted in, and kills pretty much
everyone on site. In the end though, some titlecard tells us that both
Amelia and Geeves have vanished from the face of the earth. If
you cross Peter Walker's trash classic House
of Whipcord with Blair
Witch Project, this is what you get ... and above everything
else, this film poses one important question: Why would one ever want to
blend House of Whipcord
and Blair Witch Project?
An inmate of a privately run torture camp making a documentary while
incarcerated and being tortured, that simply doesn't make sense. It's
beyond me anyhow why so many characters in horror movies in the 2000's are
documentary filmmakers to begin with. Apart from that, it's weird and
sad that to a degree, the film even tends to take Geeves's side:
Amelia is only allowed higher moral ground because she is not really a
stripper and only does what she does to save her daughter's life (which is
talked to death in the prologue), but the film isn't in the least
interested what happens to the other girls, the real strippers, as if to
say, "hey they take off their cloths, serves them right." Am I
the only one who sees some double standard here (especially as the film
doesn't shy away from showing all those girls' tits)? Having said all that, Penance
is not the worst movie ever seen, it's at times even entertaining and
features a few nice suspense setpieces - one just wishes that a little
more thought had gone into the screenplay, there was a little less use of
handcamera, and the whole thing was a little more mature and honest in its
treatment of strippers, then the film could have even been an at least
decent House
of Whipcord-rip-off.
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find Penance at adultvideouniverse.com
