Film Review – Penny Lane is Dead

“Penny Lane is Dead” is an Australian production, and a particularly vicious one. Making her feature-length debut as a writer/director is Mia-kate Russell, and she’s in an aggressive mood, paying tribute to the harshness of exploitation cinema from the 1970s with the picture, recalling days of drive-in cinema horrors where characters went feral and violence was potent. Russell isn’t completely committed to bleakness with the offering, but she gets close enough, asking viewers to sit through a revenge story that’s big on awful characters doing horrible things. “Penny Lane is Dead” is pitiless work, and not an endeavor that’s easily digested, but for genre fans who enjoy harder edges to their presentations of pain, Russell is certainly interested in delivering a hostile effort that doesn’t allow for much hope. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com