1986. The year of Chernobyl and Madonna’s True Blue. A time of big hair, cheap booze and durries burning through sticky Australian summers. “Penny Lane is Dead” drops itself directly into that atmosphere before curdling into something far sleazier and more violent. Written and directed by Mia’Kate Russell, the film follows 17-year-old Penny Lane (Bailey Spalding) and her best friends Toni (Tahlee Fereday) and Amy (Alexandra Jensen) as they celebrate Penny’s university acceptance with a debauched “no dick event” at a remote beach house. The night takes a nasty turn when Penny’s cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn) arrives uninvited with laced cupcakes, followed by her sleazy older boyfriend Angus (Ben O’Toole) and his gang of blokes.

From there, Penny Lane is Dead mutates into a chaotic Ozploitation slasher drenched in sapphic longing, punk-horror energy and delightfully gnarly practical gore. Russell’s background in special effects and makeup is immediately obvious. The blood sprays freely, wounds split open beautifully and every violent payoff feels properly earned. My screening oscillated constantly between laughter, cheers, and full-body groans. As the closer for the Fantastic Film Festival Australia, this is exactly the kind of film that thrives in a packed crowd, where every jump scare and absurd line ricochets through the audience.

Tonally, the film is doing a lot at once. During the post-screening Q&A, Fereday spoke about horror being such a powerful genre precisely because it refuses to stay contained. Horror has a unique capacity to absorb other genres without losing its edge. Penny Lane is Dead embraces that messiness completely. Beneath all the screaming and violence is a surprisingly earnest sapphic love story trying desperately to survive the bloodshed.

The performances are pitched deliberately over-the-top in true grindhouse fashion, but they work because the film commits fully to its heightened world. Wright-Mendelsohn’s Kat is especially fantastic and completely unpredictable. One moment she’s ugly crying through smeared makeup, the next she’s dissolving into this unsettling mechanical laughter that makes every scene feel volatile. There’s also something refreshing about seeing a main cast with no detectable iPhone face. Everyone actually looks like they belong in grimy 1980s Australia rather than a TikTok filter version of it. The costuming and needledrops help enormously too, giving the film an authenticity that never feels forced or cosplay-level excessive.

What makes the film more divisive, though, is its depiction of violence against women. Penny Lane is Dead doesn’t shy away from exploring the ugliness of gendered violence beneath this country’s sunburnt surface. At times, I questioned whether the film could recover tonally from some of its heavier material. Comedy and sexual violence rarely blend smoothly, and there were moments where I felt the film drift dangerously close to the hollow cruelty that often plagues exploitation horror. Yet here, the brutality felt deliberate rather than purely provocative. Even when the film risks pushing too far, it never feels unaware of what it’s depicting. The violence is ugly because the attitudes underpinning it are ugly. Whether audiences find that effective or simply too mean-spirited will probably determine how much they connect with the film overall.

Still, I had a great time with it. I laughed and, like the coward I am, spent every incoming jump scare covering my eyes. Penny Lane is Dead is confident, nasty, funny and surprisingly heartfelt all at once. A grimy little love letter to Ozploitation cinema that understands horror can hold beauty and ugliness simultaneously. Also, I vote we bring back "mole" to the Australian vernacular effective immediately.