Ruth I really liked the idea to use actual phobia as the driving force of the movie. It was acted out mostly well and as a person who has an anxiety I actually could relate to the main character.But several things in this made my head hurt.1. It is good to make people face their fears, but taking someone with an anxiety attacks from potholes on a road trip seems like a stupid idea. Even if it might work it should be safe and controlled environment, but no, let's take this random hitchhiker in and make a detour. At any rate I would sue the employer of the psychologist, as she was almost as hysterical as Penny. 2. The dramatic sound effects made me think that this might be a parody. A clock - Tam Dam Dam, a tree - Tam Dam Dam! Seriously?3. Why there even was the secondary characters? They gave nothing to the plot except a half-assed sex scene with a boob. And extra indication that it is cold outside. I could somehow deal with all of aforementioned things, if the ending was at least decent, but this was almost on the same level as for The Shrine (except for the accent).

Robert J. Maxwell Rachel Miner is an adolescent girl suffering from a phobia about riding in cars, following a terrible accident in which her parents were killed. Her therapist is Mimi Rogers. Rogers agrees to drive Miner to a quiet, comfortable retreat in the woods -- taking it step by step. No drugs but breathing into a paper bag, squeezing a palm-size elastic bundle, and controlling her breathing.Man, it's tough on Miner. I felt her pain. I was in an airplane accident and have never flown since then except when drunk. It seemed a misjudgment on Rogers' part to deny Miner those posologically minimal doses of benzodiazepines. Give her the damned pills! Well, full confession. I couldn't watch this all the way through. It was terrible, one of those movies that depends on every iota of bad luck and stupidity in the screenwriter's bag of tricks. I know, Edgar Allen Poe said you should throw logic out the window and go just for the horrific effect. Yes, but he wrote "The Pit and the Pendulum" while these geniuses came up with "Penny Dreadful." Everything seems to take place at night, once the trip gets under way, so we see only what the headlights show us. Rogers grazes some hooded figure standing in the middle of the highway in the middle of nowhere, and -- caring and warm as she is -- offers to drive the silent but unhurt figure to a camp off the main highway. "The camp seems to be closed," she remarks, upon discovering that the camp seems to be closed.The hooded man is outside the car but his attributes are ominous and, finally exercising some common sense, Rogers whips the car around and guns it down the dirt road for the highway. POW. A flat tire. I believe I may have experienced a bout of microsleep here because I seem to remember a second flat tire and Rogers saying, "The spare tire is flat." That doesn't quite fit together, does it? Unless she had two spare tires.At any rate, Rogers instructs the terrified girl to remain in the car while she, Rogers, runs off into the woods in search of a public telephone. You want a desolate wooden shack in the middle of the night-time forest with a phone booth next to it? Voici! Again, there were some periods of confusion, some of which must have been on my end of the channel. I was kind of hoping that Rogers would try to call for help but find that she didn't have the required change in the required denominations, but I seem to recall coins tinkling down into the collection box.Cut back to the car, where Miner is so distraught that she begins hallucinating. We get instantaneous shots of the hooded stranger in the headlights, along with loud, crashing, dissonant stings on the sound track. She's going mad and she's still fighting desperately to keep from swallowing a couple of minor tranquilizers.At that point, something must have snapped. The lights went out in my living room. The hooded menace emerged from the television screen, there were flashes of lightning revealing that the homicidal maniac's features resembled those of my ex wife, mustache and all, a roiling cloud of black smoke, a knife blade with a serrated edge glinted, and -- and -- that's all I remember, your honor. I can't explain the gelatinous substance on the floor.

lopcar1993 Penny Dreadful is not a great horror film, I've seen better. But what it is is an amazingly brilliant psychological thriller , Penny dreadful is a well made and well acted horror film that will satisfy any horror lovers urge for a good time. After surviving a horrible automobile accident that killed both her parents Penny Dearborn has an unstable and perpetual fear of cars, her therapists suggest that they confront her fear head on. So they take a road trip to cure Penny's fear, but it has dangerous and disastrous results when they pick up a psychotic hitchhiker. Penny Dreadful is a dark and gritty psychological thriller that takes you into the mind and soul of a frightened and traumatized young girl and her fight to say alive. This film explore three main themes, 1. terror and what it can do to you if you let it control you. 2: What certain events in your life can do to change who you are and what you are. 3: What the darkness of a quiet woods can do to turn your worst fears into a reality. Penny Dreadful is a psychological thriller that is right up there with the best and will continue to shock and scare you for a long time to come.

silentcheesedude Did I see the same movie as the others?Girl is afraid of cars because parents dies in car accident. Her and her psychiatrist go out for a drive in the mountains. Hitchhiker gets hit by them. Hitchhiker stalks them. People die. That's pretty much about it.And it started so promising! I like Mimi Rodgers. I liked the cool intro with the credits. And the set up with the "fear of cars" felt pretty real. But the movie almost immediately begins to fall apart the moment we start to see repetitive actions that may be employed to fill the time slot of an hour and a half, to the point of ad nauseum.Let me give you an example. "Bad guy" stalks "Girl" that's trapped in the car. Girl screams for a total of 3 minutes and 42 seconds "somebody help me"!! Then she see's bad guy. Cheap special effects are employed, like a heart beat and a fast zoom in and out. 10 minutes later, we STILL are in this scene, separated only by another time filler until more murders begin. The gore is somewhat muted, and some of it silly. There's a sex scene in it which felt like they just HAD to do to make it compete with the rest of the movies we've seen for the last 40 years.Movies that take place in one specific location for long periods of time can be pulled off if done correctly. Saw did it. So did Phonebooth. But slasher movies are so boring when they follow the numbers, give no accent to the characters, and give you nothing more about the story then what you see on the screen. We should have gotten rid of this, what, 17 years ago sometime back in the 90's?Oh well, at least we got to see Michael Berryman, but in a useless cameo.