Penny Dreadful (2006)

Rachel Miner is an adolescent girl suffering from a phobia about riding in cars, following a terrible accident in which her parents were killed. Her therapist is Mimi Rogers. Rogers agrees to drive Miner to a quiet, comfortable retreat in the woods -- taking it step by step. No drugs but breathing into a paper bag, squeezing a palm-size elastic bundle, and controlling her breathing.Man, it's tough on Miner. I felt her pain. I was in an airplane accident and have never flown since then except when drunk. It seemed a misjudgment on Rogers' part to deny Miner those posologically minimal doses of benzodiazepines. Give her the damned pills! Well, full confession. I couldn't watch this all the way through. It was terrible, one of those movies that depends on every iota of bad luck and stupidity in the screenwriter's bag of tricks. I know, Edgar Allen Poe said you should throw logic out the window and go just for the horrific effect. Yes, but he wrote "The Pit and the Pendulum" while these geniuses came up with "Penny Dreadful." Everything seems to take place at night, once the trip gets under way, so we see only what the headlights show us. Rogers grazes some hooded figure standing in the middle of the highway in the middle of nowhere, and -- caring and warm as she is -- offers to drive the silent but unhurt figure to a camp off the main highway. "The camp seems to be closed," she remarks, upon discovering that the camp seems to be closed.The hooded man is outside the car but his attributes are ominous and, finally exercising some common sense, Rogers whips the car around and guns it down the dirt road for the highway. POW. A flat tire. I believe I may have experienced a bout of microsleep here because I seem to remember a second flat tire and Rogers saying, "The spare tire is flat." That doesn't quite fit together, does it? Unless she had two spare tires.At any rate, Rogers instructs the terrified girl to remain in the car while she, Rogers, runs off into the woods in search of a public telephone. You want a desolate wooden shack in the middle of the night-time forest with a phone booth next to it? Voici! Again, there were some periods of confusion, some of which must have been on my end of the channel. I was kind of hoping that Rogers would try to call for help but find that she didn't have the required change in the required denominations, but I seem to recall coins tinkling down into the collection box.Cut back to the car, where Miner is so distraught that she begins hallucinating. We get instantaneous shots of the hooded stranger in the headlights, along with loud, crashing, dissonant stings on the sound track. She's going mad and she's still fighting desperately to keep from swallowing a couple of minor tranquilizers.At that point, something must have snapped. The lights went out in my living room. The hooded menace emerged from the television screen, there were flashes of lightning revealing that the homicidal maniac's features resembled those of my ex wife, mustache and all, a roiling cloud of black smoke, a knife blade with a serrated edge glinted, and -- and -- that's all I remember, your honor. I can't explain the gelatinous substance on the floor.

Just so you know, I hate (1) movies where the white girl being chased falls down while running, (2) movies where the heroine/victim is a whiny, skittish, needy twerp, (3) movies where people do things you know they would NEVER DO, like two women picking up a male hitchhiker at night on a dark road. Just not gonna happen, bro.This movie was a waste of the talents and looks of Mimi Rogers. I liked the fact that some of my favorite B-movie faces (Mickey Jones, Michael Berryman)because at least they got a paycheck out of this waste of time. Other than that, it was a complete and irritating bore, spent mostly listening to Rachel Miner's character whine about something else. Or trying to break a car windshield with an umbrella (!). Jeez! I truly had a few moments when I hoped the protagonist would knock off Penny just to STOP HER WHINING., but then there wouldn't have been much of a movie. Wait, that's wrong: there wasn't much a movie anyway. Give Penny credit for one thing, though: she was stoned most of the movie on prescription pharmaceuticals. Maybe I should have tried that....

Penny Dreadful is not a great horror film, I've seen better. But what it is is an amazingly brilliant psychological thriller , Penny dreadful is a well made and well acted horror film that will satisfy any horror lovers urge for a good time. After surviving a horrible automobile accident that killed both her parents Penny Dearborn has an unstable and perpetual fear of cars, her therapists suggest that they confront her fear head on. So they take a road trip to cure Penny's fear, but it has dangerous and disastrous results when they pick up a psychotic hitchhiker. Penny Dreadful is a dark and gritty psychological thriller that takes you into the mind and soul of a frightened and traumatized young girl and her fight to say alive. This film explore three main themes, 1. terror and what it can do to you if you let it control you. 2: What certain events in your life can do to change who you are and what you are. 3: What the darkness of a quiet woods can do to turn your worst fears into a reality. Penny Dreadful is a psychological thriller that is right up there with the best and will continue to shock and scare you for a long time to come.

If you make a film with the word 'dreadful' in the title, and your film is dreadful, you've really got to expect that a lot of the reviews for the film will express that very adjective; and I really cant think of a better way to describe 'Penny Dreadful' than the second word of its title. I'm all for horror films that try to be original and don't follow an obvious and often done plot line. As a result, a film about someone with a phobia of cars actually sounded promising; but unfortunately the director has opted to pepper the film with clichés, which cancels out any originality. The plot focuses on two women travelling through America in a car. One of them is Penny Deerborn; a young girl who suffers from the fear or cars, and the other is Orianna Volkes - her psychologist. Rather than simply prescribe a bike, Orianna decides that the best medicine for someone who is afraid of cars is to travel many miles to the place where her mother died, in a car. Brilliant! Naturally this pea-brained scheme goes wrong, and young Penny ends up in a nightmarish situation.The majority of this film involves the young girl trapped inside the car. The idea of someone being trapped and intensely frightened could easily lead to a good horror movie; but here it just isn't interesting and the result of that is that we simply don't care about anything that is happening in the film. The script doesn't allow either of the central characters to be made interesting and when the bulk of the film relies on one of them in particular; that really is a large problem. Rachel Miner takes the lead role and actually doesn't do too badly with the material she's given, and starring opposite her is Mimi Rogers as the psychologist with the silly plan, who also does OK. The film doesn't have a lot of variety in terms of the locations used; most of it takes place inside a car anyway. The film really just drones on for most of the running time and it all boils down to a stupid ending. Overall, this is really just a missed opportunity as with better handling, Penny Dreadful could at least have been decent. Oh well...just add it to the long list of dull modern horror films instead.