My quick rating – 5.9/10. SHUDDER WARNING: This flick contains a frankly unreasonable (and welcome) amount of blood, bad decisions, and relatives who should not be invited to any friendly functions. I mean, there are get-together celebrations, and then there’s Penny Lane Is Dead where your resentful cousin arrives uninvited, brings drugged cupcakes, and eventually turns your beach holiday into a full-scale hostage situation. So, yeah, maybe stick with Christmas lunch at Grandma’s.
In the hot summer of 1986 in Australia, the film doesn’t take long to make us aware that it’s going to be an extremely terrible holiday. Penny (Bailey Spalding) arrives at a remote beach house with her best friends Toni (Tahlee Fereday) and Amy (Alexandra Jensen) to celebrate getting accepted to university. The sun, the sand, the alcohol, and the friendship. What could go wrong? This is when their cousin Kat, who has enough bitterness to light a whole city, appears along with her cupcakes
Once Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn) drugs Penny and is forced to leave, you might think the worst is over. Adorable. She returns with her boyfriend Angus and his merry band of psychopaths, and suddenly the beach house has been converted into a violent little kingdom. Toni and Amy are isolated, outnumbered, and left to figure out how to survive while the body count starts behaving like it has somewhere to be.
The biggest selling point is just how committed the movie is to being an 80s horror movie. It feels like one, looks like one, and apparently has no interest whatsoever in being subtle about it. The practical gore is gloriously nasty, the violence is mean-spirited, and the whole thing operates at a pretty satisfying level of “oh, wow, they actually did that.”
It’s also, underneath all the carnage, essentially a very dark love story. That sounds considerably more sophisticated than the movie actually is, but there’s something interesting buried beneath the blood splatter. Relationships, resentment, obsession, and the lengths people will go when affection curdles into something considerably less healthy.
At around 90 minutes, Penny Lane Is Dead understands its assignment. There’s no need to pad this thing out with an hour of characters staring meaningfully into the middle distance before someone gets their head rearranged. It’s shocks, thrills, blood and escalating insanity, delivered with a full-tilt commitment to its own crazy tone.
It isn’t particularly deep, and some of the character decisions and plot mechanics wobble more than they should. But the performances, practical effects, violence and sheer bloody-mindedness make those flaws surprisingly easy to forgive.
Penny Lane Is Dead isn’t going to change your life. It might, however, make you reconsider accepting cupcakes from your cousins. And what a weird eating ritual they have, LOL.
