Michael Ledo Amelia (Marieh Delfino) reluctantly becomes a stripper when her daughter Asher gets a disease. She is in defiance of numerous laws by not having insurance and doesn't even apply for CHIP...okay it's fictional. She is not comfortable as a stripper and subs for Sassy/Suzie (Eve Mauro) for big money. IT'S A TRAP!!!! The place is run by a guy crazy about purity. He reminded me of an evil General Jack. D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden Dr. Strangelove) who denied women his "essence." They worked really hard trying to figure out out to get strippers into a found footage film. Thanks for the boobies, but overall the film wasn't that entertaining. The torture scenes were either off camera or blocked. Girls dancing without music doesn't make it. And what was with the Nazi Nurse Ratchet? F-word and nudity ( Marieh Delfino, Eve Mauro, Morann Peri, Katherine Randolph, Sita Young )

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.

dwayne-miller This film lures its viewers down into an graphic and disgusting abyss around the role of being a stripper, and attempts to terrify strippers and pre-strippers away from the lifestyle. Shot in documentary style, we are taken into a dark world that crosses between stripper life, trickery, and dark religion.A redeeming quality of the movie is how it gave the impression that certain risks aren't worth the reward and that desperation can bring us to threatful situations. Certainly not an original plot, but the movie was decent enough for viewership. The acting was alright by a mostly anonymous cast.Michael Rooker's character should have been predominantly featured as the character hadn't been seen in most of the film. He played his role well of a psycologically disturbed man who twists morality, righteousness, and penance to teach a lesson to the women that chose to sell their body. This movie is also not for the weak at heart and gets very graphic.All in all, I'll write it off as nothing special. You can give it a look though, but if you have a better film to watch, you should slip that in instead.

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.