Penance

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.

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.

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.

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....