Penance Lane

What starts as a good premise and makes you think you're in for a good ghost/haunted house with a twist, takes a wrong turn in the middle towards ridiculousness and cliché galore. The story makes absolutely no sense at all and the worst of it, is not even mildly entertaining. The good reviews must be fake or written by 12 year old kids.

Low, low budget. Not so good acting. But something kept my interest up.

I must admit that I had initially expected the 2020 movie "Penance Lane" to be something quite different than what it turned out to be. I was expecting this to be more of a traditional horror movie, but instead I ended up watching something that felt like a mutated hybrid that proved to be rather mundane and bland.

The storyline told in "Penance Lane" just failed to properly entertain me. Sure, I managed to sit through the entire movie, but I can't claim to have been overly impressed or entertained by what I saw from writers Renae Geerlings, Matt Granger, Mikey Granger and Munier Sharrieff. And in fact, I must admit that it sort of astounds me that four writers can collectively manage to write something this trivial and generic.

While the storyline was bland, mediocre and predictable, the characters in the movie were just downright pointless. There was no attempts even made to flesh out the characters and give them any kind of personalities, traits, quirks or distinctive features. Every character could essentially easily have been replaced by the character before it, and it wouldn't have made a difference.

And the acting in the movie was as rigid and wooden as the storyline. So don't expect to be blown away by stellar performances that will rack up one award after another.

Director Péter Engert just failed to deliver a wholesome movie with this 2020 horror movie titled "Penance Lane". And I must admit that the movie's cover, title and synopsis severely oversold the movie, because it was made up to be something more than it was.

If you enjoy proper horror movies, you might as well skip out on "Penance Lane", as it just falls short of delivering anything worthwhile watching.

My rating of this 2020 horror movie settles on a three out of ten stars.

Oh my God, who thought up this tripe? First scene, gang breaks into house, it seems haunted. It starts off okay. Second scene a man comes into town to fix up the house, meets and helps a mum and daughter, the film's seems to be going okay. Strange things happen in the house, film seems to be getting slightly better. Another night in the house, you find out what caused the noise, film goes down hill at a hundred miles an hour. From there the story stays okay but the execution is dreadful, once the storyline comes into play, it was hard to watch because it was badly done. All in all, the film was cheaply made, usually that doesn't bother me but when it is acted by amateurs and it shows, it spoils the film. The only good thing were the mum and daughter were nice to look at.

So, Triple-H plays an ex-con as usual.... no, wait. That's not Triple-H... hmmm... so this film with Booker T and DDP making cameos has a lead role played by someone playing Triple-H as an ex-con who on his release heads to a town where he has a motive to find some hidden money Booker Ts brother hid their a decade prior (Its not Stevie Ray, mustve been a third brother?) He gets hired by Bo Duke who has forgotten about racing The General Lee and become a preacher who happens to own the house and hires the fake Triple-H to fix it up. Only fake Triple-H discovers the house has some hidden occupants.

I'd say the script writer wanted to make a Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel, got rejected and re-wrote it to not be the characters of TCM, but figured making the Leather Face character a female would surely be a way to hide his original script plan to get this made.

Fake-H then makes friends with a girl who feels some unknown reason to stick to him like flies to ... dung... and when the dung hits the fan she ends up in it as deep as he is as they have to fight for survival.

I wouldn't really call this a horror. It takes a few elements of past horror looking characters and enters them in a small TCM style plot, but it soon becomes more of a typical action movie. The done to death scenario where some guy is just so brave and tough that he plans to just leave the trouble, but feels it's his duty to go back and protect the girl and kill the bad guys to save the day kinda thing.

It's no tribute to old-school horror, those reviews are obvious fakes that plague Imdb these days.

It's ok for one viewing, but it's a once seen, you'll never have an urge to see it ever again deal.

See it, don't see it, you decide, but you're not missing anything special.