We caught Penny Lane Is Dead at the Fantasia Film Festival, and it is exactly the kind of gnarly Australian horror that sneaks up on a festival crowd and leaves half the room grinning and the other half reaching for the exit.
Meaghan went solo on this one, which meant double duty at the festival and a spoiler-free breakdown for the rest of us.
This is the feature debut from writer-director Mia’Kate Russell, and Penny Lane Is Dead made its North American premiere at Fantasia on July 20 before its wider release on Shudder on August 28. If you are reading this around the time it drops, you can see for yourself.
Shudder scooping up a movie like this is not a surprise. “Shudder’s smart,” Arthur said.
They’re just picking up horror movies left and right!
They know their audience, and they knew what they were doing here.
What Penny Lane Is Dead Is Actually About
Set in 1986 during a scorching Australian summer, the film follows three friends closing out one chapter of their lives before the next one starts. Penny Lane (Bailey Spalding) is celebrating getting into university, and she is spending the night at her family’s cabin with her two closest friends, Toni (Tahlee Fereday) and Amy (Alexandra Jensen). It is a girls’ night, out past the edge of the city, the kind of quiet a horror movie exists to ruin.
Then Penny’s cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn) shows up, and the whole thing tips over. Kat is a messy, chaotic presence who pulls a prank that sets off everything that follows, and when things go sideways, she calls her boyfriend to come get her. That boyfriend is Angus (Ben O’Toole), an ex-convict and a genuinely horrible human being, and he does not come alone. He arrives with two of his associates, and from there the movie becomes something meaner.
Genre-wise, this one wears a few hats. It is a prank-gone-wrong film, a home invasion film, and a revenge film, all stitched together. “That’s a cool setup,” Arthur said.
Literally anything could happen.
He is right, and the movie takes full advantage of that.
Not Sure What to Watch?
Answer 4 questions, get curated horror movies to watch.
The Cast Carries It
Here is where Penny Lane Is Dead earns a lot of goodwill. The performances are strong across the board, and two of them run away with the picture.
Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn as Kat is delightfully unhinged. She is the engine of the chaos, the person who lights the fuse and then keeps feeding the fire, and she is so committed to the messiness that you cannot look away. Ben O’Toole as Angus is batshit terrifying in the best way, the kind of villain who makes your skin crawl every time he opens his mouth. Together they hand the film its worst nightmares and its most watchable moments.
If some of the cast looks familiar, there is a reason. A chunk of this ensemble has ties to the Philippou brothers’ orbit; Alexandra Jensen, who plays Amy, appeared in Talk To Me.
Australia knows how to cast this stuff, and it shows. The three leads are believable as friends, which matters more than people give it credit for, because you have to actually care about these women before the movie starts putting them through hell.
Fair Warning: This One Gets Rough
We need to be straight with you here. Penny Lane Is Dead is an exploitation film in the truest sense, and it does not flinch. There is assault in this movie. It is not shown directly on camera, but you hear it, and that is its own kind of hard to sit through. There is some ambiguity built into the scene, and the film plays with that afterward through dialogue, but the assault is still very much there, and it is rough.
We are not telling you this to scare you off. We are telling you because a couple of these moments caught Meaghan off guard, and she watches a lot of horror. Assault revenge films are not for everybody, and that is fair. If that subgenre is a hard no for you, this is a movie to skip, and there is no shame in that.
The reaction to Penny Lane Is Dead has been mixed, and we understand why. Tonally, the film wants to be a horror dark comedy, but the brutality it piles onto its characters can pull you right out of the joke. Australian horror tends to walk that line; think of something like The Loved Ones, which balances a dark, unhinged sense of humor against real cruelty.
Penny Lane Is Dead reaches for the same balance and does not always land it. There were moments in the screening where a laugh was clearly meant to happen, and the room stayed silent.
It’s a difficult balance the movie doesn’t fully respect.
Meaghan put it, and that is the honest read.
The Gore, the Payoff, and Yes, the Fainting
Now for the fun part, because there is plenty of fun here too. This movie is gory. The practical makeup effects are excellent from start to finish, and if you love your horror gnarly and hands-on, you are going to eat this up.
Because it is a revenge film, there is a lot of comeuppance, and it is satisfying. The people inflicting these horrible things get what is coming to them, and the movie hands you real catharsis after making you sit in the ugliness.
You’re selling it to me right now,
Arthur said somewhere in here, and that is the effect. There are great action sequences, great fight scenes, and a final girl worth rooting for. Kat holds the whole thing together as a character even as she is tearing everyone else apart.
You may have seen the headlines about someone passing out during a screening. That is true, it happened, and Meaghan was in the room. Whether it was the gore or a medical issue like low blood sugar, nobody can actually say, since it came right after a particularly gnarly sequence. Either way, the story got picked up everywhere. “This poor person should monetize this if they can,” Meaghan joked. “Go get that bag.“
For what it is worth, horror does funny things to people. Meaghan has never fainted at a movie, but she once had to pause Gerald’s Game during the hand-degloving scene because she got lightheaded and thought she was going down. You never really know what is going to get you until you are in it.
The Verdict
Penny Lane Is Dead is a gritty, gory, action-packed Ozploitation throwback with a killer villain duo and a final girl who delivers. It does not always nail the tricky balance between comedy and cruelty, and the assault content makes it a tough sit for some viewers, so go in knowing what you are getting.
If you love your horror mean, practical, and cathartic, this is an easy recommendation, and it hits Shudder on August 28. “I wanna watch this movie,” Arthur said. “You sold it to me.”