Penance

I'm as sick and tired of predictable torture flicks and found footage films as the next horror fan, and so Penance—which 'cleverly' combines these two tired sub-genres to create the 'found torture footage' sub-sub-genre—hardly sounded like it was going to deliver much of interest to this particular jaded viewer.

Indeed, after just a few minutes of wobbly Blair Witch-style nonsense, during which attractive young mother Amelia Wallis (Marieh Delfino) prattles in front of a video camera about her love of Topanga Canyon, her job at a centre for battered women, and her daughter, I was itching to switch off. But what I had forgotten about was the power of a fit bird in the raw to make almost anything worthwhile...

As part of her audition tape for a TV game-show, the usually reserved Amelia agrees to help her stripper pal Suzie (Eve Mauro) entertain a group of stags at a party; let's just say that this girl was built to strip! From that moment on, Penance becomes pure trash entertainment: after Suzie is given a black eye by a customer, Amelia reluctantly stands in for her friend on a highly paid job for a special client, a decision that results in the poor girl's incarceration at a disused asylum where she is subjected to torture by Geeves, a religious zealot who has dedicated his life to purifying the souls of strippers. Cue lots of gratuitous nudity, pointless cameos from horror icons, dumb plot development, vaginal mutilation, self-castration, and more nudity.

Penance's use of the found footage gimmick is totally implausible, the story painfully dumb, the supposedly tense action absolutely laughable, and the violence disappointing (although nasty in concept, the gore is not that graphic), but Marieh Delfino kept me entertained throughout, albeit on the most basic of levels. In fact, it makes me wonder if I would have enjoyed The Blair Witch Project more if Heather Donahue had only thrown caution to the wind and flipped out her norks....

This film is loosely inspired by the notorious Graeme Stephen Reeves also known as "The Butcher of Bega". He is a former gynecologist and obstetrician charged in relation to alleged sexual and indecent assaults and genital mutilation of all of his female patients.

The film stars Marieh Delfino (from Jeepers Creepers 2) as Amelia. Amelia is a single mother who is trying her best to care for her sick child by taking on a few side jobs of being a exotic dancer. Thanks to her friend Eve played by Alice Amter (Big Bang Theory's Mrs. Koothrappali) she learns the ins and outs of being a stripper and reluctantly follows in her friend's footsteps.

Up until this point of the film, there is LOTS of nudity and lots of shaky cam footage & dialogue.

That being said, we continue following our lead actress as she falls into a dancing gig. This gig leads her and us into a debauched and visceral hellhole, into the arms of a deranged madman played effortlessly by Graham McTavish (from The Hobbit trilogy & RAMBO). Graham brings Graeme Reeves to life in a most disturbing way.

Most of the scenes in the film take place in a what is believed to be a asylum hospital of sorts. This is where the film gets to the meat of it. The claustrophobia that is created alongside the brutality & gritty realism that is seen in the Hospital scenes are ones to make any man or woman cringe. Marieh Delfino does an AMAZING job at making the viewer feel she truly is in danger of her life & fighting to survive. It's quite unsettling in some places to watch.

If you watch the film, you'll know what I am talking about. If you can make it past the 30 minute mark, then you are in for a ride of disturbing proportions.

I'd also like to mention that two cameos of Horror's favorite bad guys are thrown into the mix. Tony Todd and Michael Rooker are placed in the film as Henchmen of the deranged Dr. Reeves.

That being said, this film is combination of both torture porn and found footage horror. The film in itself is really hard to watch in some instances, mainly due to the prolonged build up of the characters and the obvious torture & brutality of the women. It's a film that after watching it you definitely wanna see something else. It's a film that makes the audience feel uncomfortable and dirty. If you enjoy the grittiness of torture inspired HOSTEL-like films then check this out.

Probably best compared to a combination of Saw and the Killing Room. Only simpletons with an attention span disability will call this torture porn. I'm starting to wonder if there's a group of people out there who simply go around labeling stuff torture porn to turn people off from otherwise great films (such as Martyrs).

It does have some nasty scenes, but more is left to the imagination than is shown, so that kills the porn element. There is torture, and largely the film involves a very psychologically disturbed person seeking revenge through torture.

So, psychological torture horror with some gore, yes. A Saw copycat, yes, in some ways. But that's far too simple to capture what's going on here. A very well thought out story.

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.

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.