Penance

This movie strikes me on so many levels as absolute trash. I wish the lead actress was at least attractive. Although, she did have nice breasts... which was the only redeeming quality of this flick, gratuitous nudity. Especially in the case of one Eve Mauro. That girl is absolutely gorgeous. Smokin' hot! I think I would probably watch anything with her in it, at least once. But alas, I digress from my original reason for writing this.

"Candyman", "Dead Man on Campus", "Warlock" and Brandi Svennings dad all in one movie? They obviously did not invest wisely of their spoils from their actual roles in real movies... That, or the director/writer/producer caught and filmed them all in some suck-off man orgy together and blackmailed them into making this horrible movie.

Actually a documentary on fecal matter would probably be more entertaining than this movie is...

If you're a guy and thinking about watching this movie, punch yourself in the balls... really hard. That pain is as enjoyable as this movie is going to be for you. If you're a girl, rinse your eyes with vodka. Same goes...

I will never understand how something as bad as this gets made. Along the line, people kept giving this the green light. HOW? The actors and actresses agreed to be in it. WHY? Distributors agreed to release it. Again I ask, in F's-name WHY? The economy is steadily slipping, but it seems the movie industry will throw copious amounts of cash to whatever idiot comes along. (I bet the screenplay was written in crayon.) I think "Clerks" cost a little over fifty grand to make. No actors, no sets and lastly, no color. Taking all of that into account, this movie at the very least, probably cost a cool quarter mil. WTF?!?! Are you serious?!?! In this day and age, Jake Whatever-his-name-is should be lynched for wasting that much money. Like rappers and athletes buying gold and platinum jewelry/teeth/wheels... but that's a whole other rant...

I give it two stars. One for each of Eve Mauro's wonderful breasts. Nothing else.

Filling in for a friend on a stripping job, a young woman finds she's captured by a deranged madman intended to purify similar women for their sins and is tortured to achieve those results.

Yet another utterly retarded Torture Film here, only this one made all the more infuriated with the inclusion of the "Found Footage" moniker, so it's pretty much what would happen if "Paranormal Activity" did the "Saw" series, and that only spells disaster for all involved due to the inability to see anything going on because the camera's shaking too much. The tactic makes the usual point of such films, watching the torture methods and the abundant nudity nearly impossible to determine because of the inane manner of narrating over everything, twisting it to odd angles or positions in order to avoid being caught in such a precarious moment, which only highlights the film's biggest blunder of all in the fact that no one in their right mind would be filming during such activities and their decided inability to remove it from them to begin with and you have a pretty egregious set of flaws just from the set-up. Plus, this is yet another effort that must be downgraded for the inclusion of twisted religious reasoning since this makes no sense why the tactics must be undertaken and you have absolutely no interest beyond the nudity to watch this, which isn't that great since none of the ones who should are the ones that do. Granted, some of the torture methods are quite gruesome and bloody, overall this is a pure waste of time.

Rated R: Graphic Violence, Full Nudity and Graphic Language.

Penance is an example of this decade's "torture porn" craze at its worst. Cheaply made, with largely unknown actors, the film lacks the creativity of films such as Saw, substituting shock tactics for originality.

The story is nothing new. An innocent young woman is forced to become a stripper because of financial trouble, and ends up falling into the hands of a depraved religious fanatic. (I'm a humanist, and even I think this movie gives religion a bad name.) What follows is an hour long wallow in torture and extremely graphic sequences of genital mutilation, both male and female.

What makes the movie particularly disgusting is its implicit acceptance of the moral logic of the villain. The protagonist is a victim of circumstance, not a "bad" stripper like the others, who are depicted in the most stereotypical, degrading way possible. At times, this approach pushes the film into outright misogyny.

Furthermore, Penance relies on a video taping framing device ripped off from better films like REC. The result is a cheap looking digital feature that adds nothing to the overall story.

The only good points of the film are the scenes with Michael Rooker, which unfortunately comprise only ten minutes or so. One wishes the film had been focused on his character instead.

They don't get much worse than this. Plot makes no sense. Characters wouldn't all be that stupid. This is a "found video footage" type movie and you are supposed to believe there are many cameras and everyone's first priority, even at their own peril is to videotape things. Your life is in immediate danger, you need to stop and videotape. Please.... If you came for the nudity, it's not worth it. If you came for the violence it's uninspiring. And there really is not much nudity or violence anyway. 1 star but deserves less.

This film lures its viewers down into an graphic and disgusting abyss around the role of being a stripper, and attempts to terrify strippers and pre-strippers away from the lifestyle. Shot in documentary style, we are taken into a dark world that crosses between stripper life, trickery, and dark religion.

A redeeming quality of the movie is how it gave the impression that certain risks aren't worth the reward and that desperation can bring us to threatful situations. Certainly not an original plot, but the movie was decent enough for viewership. The acting was alright by a mostly anonymous cast.

Michael Rooker's character should have been predominantly featured as the character hadn't been seen in most of the film. He played his role well of a psycologically disturbed man who twists morality, righteousness, and penance to teach a lesson to the women that chose to sell their body. This movie is also not for the weak at heart and gets very graphic.

All in all, I'll write it off as nothing special. You can give it a look though, but if you have a better film to watch, you should slip that in instead.