Hello, Everyone. It’s been a few months since I last spoke at you, and lord knows I didn’t intend for it to take so long. I have some good excuses, but will save some of the details for an upcoming newsletter. For now, I’ll just say that my partner Jene and I have spent much of the last few months trying to buy an apartment near our current Flatbush residence. We were only approved by the co-op board this past Tuesday and man, what a relief. I also hope to have some good news about my next book, which I haven’t written yet, as opposed to another next book that I have already (co-)written, but don’t know the fate of. (Some of you may have seen a notice or two for it, and no, it’s not the history of gore book…). So I haven’t been idle, just struggling to get a few things off the ground.

Anyway, for now I want to share a review that I wrote for Roger Ebert dot com, but that wasn’t published simply because they already posted a review. Accidents happen, but I think the Ozploitation throwback Penny Lane is Dead is still worthy, so I’m posting my review here. Check it out and if the movie sounds good to you, keep an eye out for it when it pops up on Shudder.

The retro home invasion chiller “Penny Lane is Dead” takes place in 1986 at an Australian beach house. In real life, the poly-genre umbrella of Australian exploitation cinema was nearing a decadent crest in 1986 with standout releases like “Dead-End Drive-In”, a winking dystopian sci-fi social commentary, and “Fair Game”, a gnarly rape/revenge stunt showcase. 

“Penny Lane is Dead” is a bloody and unnerving hostage thriller that pits a group of recent high school grads against a gang of unsavory rowdies. It’s also a love letter to Ozploitation’s pre-1980s heyday and, better yet, more than a punch-drunk vehicle for unpleasant shock tactics and self-conscious nostalgia. 

Festival audiences have understandably had strong feelings about the movie’s robust mean streak, which is thankfully sustained throughout a fleet 85-minute runtime. But “Penny Lane is Dead” isn’t simply an effective vehicle for shock scares. 

Writer/director Mia’Kate Russell and her collaborators exhibit such an impressive mastery of tone that they somehow turn their otherwise well-executed pastiche into a hopeful corrective to an often scuzzy, but fondly remembered sub-section of grindhouse cinema.

Russell’s debut feature begins at a house party: a quartet of young women gather to celebrate Penny (Bailey Spalding) after she’s accepted at a decent college. Their celebration is predictably cut short after Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn), the black sheep of her peer group, invites her ex-con boyfriend Angus (Ben O’Toole) and his shifty buddies to come over. A series of deaths and some genuinely upsetting bloodshed follow. But before Angus and his buddies roll up, we learn that Penny and her friend Toni (Tahlee Fereday) kissed each other for the first time recently, and while Toni doesn’t want to make a big deal of it, their confusing moment of bliss also complicates some things for them and their mates.

Foregrounding without over-emphasizing Toni and Penny’s romantic tension says a lot about Russell and her collaborators’ priorities. Firstly, while Angus and his gang often seem to overshadow Penny and her chums, the movie starts and ends with Kat and Toni, and their conflicting claims to Penny. That’s not only a diligent rehash of genre conventions, but a welcome acknowledgment that in this kind of story, tension between frenemies is often more compelling than a straight-ahead clash with dueling antagonists. 

Secondly, Toni and Kat’s uncomfortable proximity to each other establishes not only a meaningful tension that ripples through their respective groups, but also blessedly underscores how small their world is. Everybody either knows or wants to know everybody else’s business in “Penny Lane is Dead”, which adds a welcome sting whenever Russell roughs up and occasionally dispatches her characters.

Best of all, Toni and Kat’s relationship is not only the main catalyst for each successive new twist, but also a welcome proof of Russell’s investment in her characters. Her fondness for both Kat and Toni sets them apart, as well as supporting roles like Toni and Penny’s shy, but self-assured pal Amy (Alexandra Jensen) and Angus’s stern buddy Merrick (Steve Le Marquand). Russell’s affection shows in the way that everybody preys on everyone’s insecurities, if only by revealing how powerless they all are, both as individuals and within their own group’s dynamic. 

Russell’s concern for both her pro- and antagonists also shows in her cast’s measured, if sometimes necessarily upper-case performances. O’Toole and Wright-Mendelsohn both nail their deceptively hard roles while Jensen and Le Marquand actually enjoy roles that, in a limited amount of time, draw you closer to them than you might expect. 

Russell’s ever-escalating scenario is also a disarming proof of this ignoble type of movie’s enduring appeal. How long does it take for vulnerable people to unravel if the only thing stopping them from snapping is one really bad night? Not long, in this case, which is also about how long it takes for these newly refreshed stock personalities to win you over. 

Russell and her crew nail what a lot of third and fourth generation exploiteers only aspire to. It’s no small thing to deliver such a fine-tuned showcase for reflex-testing pleasures and emotional trials, as most fellow retro color palette and surface texture fetishists will tell you. 

“Penny Lane is Dead” also makes a convincing argument that the pot-stirring edginess that defines so much pseudo-transgressive, backwards-looking neo-grindhouse cinema isn’t necessary if you’ve also assembled a well-executed thriller, albeit one that also happens to habitually overstep certain well-marked/explo-standard boundaries of good taste. A fine tribute to the past that’s never so blunt or patronizing as to either out-think or out-do its influences, “Penny Lane is Dead” suggests that the spirit of Ozploitation is alive and well, and just as gross and exciting as ever.