Nonureva Really Surprised!

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

TdSmth5 We are told that what we are about to see are tapes found at a hospital for the criminally insane. Uh huh, that's not good.Next we meet a girl named Amelia, talking to the camera. She's actually applying for an extreme life makeover show. She's a got a kid with some disease that eventually will end up costing tons of money to treat, she's in debt already, and her job, to report abuses at a woman's shelter, doesn't pay much. She gets a friend of hers to "film everything." Another friend, Suzie, offers to help her gain some confidence in herself. But Suzie is a stripper so her little course involves... stripping among other things so she even convinces Amelia to give stripping a try for some fast easy cash. At first it works out alright for Amelia. One day Suzie calls her over, she's been beat up. Amelia is outraged and wants to document it to report it but Suzie doesn't want to. Instead she suggests Amelia take her place in a stripping job that pays $3000. Amelia reluctantly accepts.She's picked up in a limo, driven to a secret location where she meets two other girls. They do a strip audition in front of an unknown and unseen guy. Next they are offered champagne and faint. They wake up in locked cells. There are lots of other girls locked up in rooms as well. A foreign woman attends to them and zaps them with a taser whenever they misbehave. Finally, the obligatory Brit in formal military clothes (?) interrogates Amelia. He wants to know if she's a stripper, which she denies claiming it's all a misunderstanding. She's beaten until she admits it.In the meantime, we learn that the Brit is on a mission to purify the girls, to rid them of sin. They have to pass 3 tests if they want to make it out alive, that's aside from the punishments they have to endure. In the process he will take out their "fun parts." And in all this, he too, is purifying himself so he thinks, and he even walks the walk by removing his own fun parts. At last Amelia decides to take charge of the situation and will attempt to make it out alive after enduring a lot of suffering.I despise lost footage movies; the characters are always stupid and insufferable, the story cheap and basic, the dialogue moronic, the shaky cam is obnoxious and to top it off you always get lousy green nightvision. But Penance is different. The POV format doesn't distract and the video quality is good, that is until the setting changes to the hospital. Then suddenly audio becomes useless. Apparently they recorded audio live and it led to a lot of echo and very little clarity. On top of that, the character of the foreign woman speaks with such a heavy accent I couldn't make out anything she said. Video suffers also in this setting, it get's darker, grainier, colors get greener. But aside from that the story is excellent, apparently based on reality. The villain's justification goes even deeper than what I described and I enjoyed the rich story which is unusual for horror movies that don't bother to justify the villain's actions or why on earth someone is filming everything, but here it all has a good explanation.Very enjoyable is also the cast, all the girls are gorgeous and there's plenty of nudity. Usually movies that deal with torture try to clean things up by avoiding nudity, but fortunately not Penance. But it's the lovely Marieh Delfino who steals the show, a natural beauty with a natural body who is also an outstanding actress. Makes no sense that this girl hasn't gotten more work. Eve Mauro also does a great and hot job as always. I wasn't expecting much from Penance, but it's a very strong horror movie.

BA_Harrison 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....

Arisenandawakened 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.

TheExpatriate700 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.