Matt matt I haven't watched all of this mess. Besides, it's screening on Chiller right now, which means I would only see an extremely censored version anyway. This is the kind of movie that makes me wonder what has happened the the American horror film industry. At one time this might have fit into the old misogynistic grind-house genre. But instead of being a Something Weird Video study in cinematographic personal weirdness, what we have here more closely resembles a badly written bit of internet degradation erotica. The very idea that this could get financed without a house being mortgaged astounds me. The idea of a group of people assembling to work on it without the hiring of friends, drug addicts, prostitutes, and/or low level porn vets says something wretched about America today. Somewhere along the line, cheap horror has lost it's charm. Where once we had a fairly consistent flow of wacky attempts to astound, we now are asked to watch some writer and director indulge in their crude, ugly, masturbatory, fantasies. This is not only true of the discount direct-to-DVD market, but of the well financed Hollywood horror flick of the day. The depths that the director's imagination is willing to plummet is the star of the film. It's as though we are reviewing the portfolios of potential serial killers and sexual sadists. So, if I haven't sat through the whole thing, and I dismiss the current trends in horror cinema, why am I even bothering to comment on something I obviously think is beyond is beyond contempt? Simple. As I said, it's screening on Chiller. For this oozing scab to appear on a basic cable channel in mid afternoon, speaks loudly of how far we have fallen. Chiller and the SyFy network were two channels I hoped to be places where I could indulge my lifelong fandom of fantasy cinema. I'm certainly no elitist. I can speak for hours about the oddball and perverse cheap thrills I've had romping through the twisted subconscious of our less fortunate film makers. But now after more than 50 years of fun, I find myself wondering what the Hell happened. Are the media financiers so cynical and disrespecting of their audience that they can ladle this mung on the publics head without a speck of regret? Like I said, I'm no naive child losing my innocence. I'm a lifelong fan of the good, the bad, and the gloriously loopy in the fantasy realm. I've rationalized this by believing that vigorous fantasy is always a revealing social self portrait, thus worthy of serious attention. I still believe that is true, but the portrait I see is of a grimy, bleak, sadistic, mediocre, artless, landscape that can't even bother to create and present something that approaches competency. The fantasy genre now resembles the cafeteria at the end of Orwell's 1984. A gray place serving inedible food to degraded lost souls who realize that all their dreams were just delusions, and reality is just something so pitiful that suicide isn't worth the trouble. How sad....

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....

Midnight_Mass I'm not one to slate low-budget films- in fact, a lot of the time, they can seem much more realistic and worth-while. This, however, is an embarrassing display of poor acting with another Brit cast as the psychopath targeting some defenceless Americans. First of all, that stereotype is getting old- we're not all like that. Secondly, any credibility that this film claims to have with its "true characters" is lost with the ridiculous idea of each party deciding to film their absurd actions from both sides. It's just not plausible and way too co-incidental.Decent if you want to see some genital mutilation (although nothing graphic), otherwise it's pretty dire...

in1984 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.