Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on November 20, 2006, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The end credits of Penny Dreadful (part of the After Dark Horrorfest, and pictured above) state that the movie is “© 2005 Dreadful Films.” Must…not…make…obvious…joke. Actually, I have to be fair and say that this isn’t a dreadful film, just a quite problematic one—starting with the fact that the title is rather misleading. The storyline has nothing to do with the Victorian-era “penny dreadful” pulp tales; it is about a girl named Penny, but she isn’t dreadful, though dreadful things do happen to her.
Quite a few of them, in fact, starting with a prologue auto crash that she survives but which bloodily kills her parents when she’s a young girl. The next we see of her, she’s a teenager (Rachel Miner) with a phobia of cars who’s being taken on a therapeutic road trip by her psychologist, Orianna (Mimi Rogers). The fact that the attendant who serves them when they stop for gas is played by Michael Berryman should warn them that no good can come of this, but they continue onward into the mountains where Penny’s childhood accident took place, and Orianna demonstrates her commitment to safe and secure driving by taking her eyes off the road long enough to almost run down a hitchhiker.
That’s not smart. Significantly less so is Orianna’s decision to give the hitchhiker a ride, and to take him all the way to his remote destination as night falls, even though he sits in the back saying nothing, face shrouded in the darkness of a parka hood, and even offers the women shish kebab off a nasty-looking metal skewer. A series of unpleasant plot turns later, Penny winds up trapped in the two-door car, pinned between two trees that prevent her from escaping, with Orianna’s corpse beside her and the threatening killer lurking in the night outside.
This is a neat concept for a claustrophobic horror film—one that director/co-writer Richard Brandes undercuts at least as often as he takes good advantage of it. A couple of the vicious tricks the killer pulls on Penny have the desired punch, and Brandes builds an overall (if minor) sense of creeping dread. Yet this atmosphere is frequently broken by jagged flash-cut moments, a trio of extraneous supporting characters are thrown in solely to provide additional victims (and, in one case, boobage) and the villain vacillates between silent menace and Freddy Krueger-esque cackling/wisecracks. All this works against any true involvement in Penny’s plight and desperation (nicely enacted by Miner), and it would really help to be able to put oneself in her distracted state of mind, because it’s the only way to accept that Penny arrives at a couple of potential solutions to her situation long after any reasonable viewer has.
There is a minor surprise involving the killer’s identity, albeit one that doesn’t have any true impact on the story, and the climactic action plays out in a manner that can be seen coming from far up the road. Penny Dreadful doesn’t end up making the most of its premise, but it deserves credit for trying something a little different in the crowded youth-horror field. And one can’t help but feel charitable toward that movie when comparing it with Wicked Little Things, another of the “8 Films to Die For.” This abysmal pooper begs the question: If, as After Dark organizer Courtney Solomon claims, 50 films were screened for consideration for the Horrorfest, how bad must the other 42 have been for this one to make the cut?
Wicked Little Things began life as Zombies, and was to have continued the collaboration of director Tobe Hooper and writers Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch following Mortuary (to which this film bears a number of similarities) and Toolbox Murders. What has resulted, in the hands of director J.S. Cardone (The Forsaken) and sole credited scripter Ben Nadivi, is a tale of the suffering of children at the hands of uncaring adults. And I’m not just talking about the greedy miners whose thoughtlessness leads to a cave-in disaster that entombs a bunch of underage workers in the early-1900s prologue. No, I’m also referring to the fact that after present-day, recently widowed Karen Tunny (Lori Heuring) arrives at an inherited house near the mine with teenaged daughter Sarah (Scout Tayler-Compton) and little Emma (Chloe Moretz), she decides to keep her kids there even though the place is filthy and infested with rats and bugs, has no running water but does have a big splotch of blood on the front door.
After the lengthy sequence introducing mother and children to this inhospitable abode, I was hoping for a follow-up scene in which they pull up to a motel, but no such luck—or cleverness on the filmmakers’ part. Instead, the movie continues its unerringly straight-faced slog through every horror cliché in the book—flashlights that go out, a vehicle that won’t start, the grizzled old local (Ben Cross…Ben Cross??) who knows the area’s secrets—while adding a number of choice inanities of its own. My favorite arrives when Sarah and her new teen friends go parking in the middle of the woods, and their car gets stuck in the mud. One of the guys gets out to push while Sarah guns the engine, and one of the dead mine kids, who have resurrected as homicidal zombies, advances on him from behind. Sarah screams a series of warnings, but her pal never hears her—because she keeps drowning out her own cries with the roar of the motor she’s revving.
Those undead mini-miners are perhaps the least frightening and mysterious killer kids in screen history, placidly strolling through the woods wearing Halloween ghoul makeup and toting shovels and picks and other implements of destruction. They apply these weapons to a number of predictable supporting victims (including, just to make sure every stereotype is accounted for, a meanie developer) as well as one large pig, and also devour a few of their victims on screen. But no amount of entrail-ripping gore can impart a single honest chill to this tired and uninspired film; it says something that at the showing I attended, the only excitement came when a fight broke out between a drunk patron and fellow viewers who objected to his loud ’n’ rude comments. Wicked Little Things has some atmospheric photography and production design (the cobweb wrangler clearly worked overtime), but not a single original thought has been applied to its conception or execution.
