31 Days of Halloween October Horror Movie Challenge - Day 3: Penny Dreadful

Today's selection I borrowed from the OverDrive app. OverDrive is another digital platform that you can use to borrow ebooks, audiobooks, comics, graphic novels, and movies. Unlike Hoopla, you can't download videos. They must be streamed. Also, you don't have the casting option. But both Hoopla and OverDrive can be accessed via web browser so you can watch on your computers. Another drawback is that you don't have unlimited access to videos, so if someone else has it borrowed, you do have to place a hold and wait for them to either return the material or for their loan to time out. Plus sides are the ease of borrowing. You have a set number of titles of any format (book, audio, video, etc.) that you can borrow from at any point in time (my library is set at ten), but once you return a title, you get that borrow back. So, unlike Hoopla, you don't have to wait for the next month to start borrowing again. Also, even if you have to place a hold, the longest loan period on a video is seven days, and then most videos expire 48 hours after you start watching, so the turnaround time is very quick. OverDrive will also email you notifications when your hold is ready. Now onto a review of one of my spooky season favorites!

Day 3 - Penny Dreadful (2012) Borrowed from Overdrive. 

“Let’s watch a movie!”

Penny Dreadful, a Frankenstein girl, is looking for love, and her two monster friends, a zombie, and a wolf-boy help her screen her date options by screening some horror movies. This anthology boasts some fun takes on some classic tropes. The terror trio in the framing story are classic monsters who live in an old movie theatre and spend their days watching horror movies, but they also tell a sweet little unrequited love story in these segments. Throughout these segments, Penny is using a dating app to find a special someone. Part of the test is that they must watch scary movies with her and her doll collection (which Penny discusses the movies with). The zombie usher has a crush on Penny and watches on as her dates don't (un?)live up to Penny's expectations. The rest of the anthology takes place as the films that Penny watches. The opening segment is a very brief, but gruesome, take on a cursed object story. There's not much to this one, but the effects are really well done. The middle feature, called “The Morning After”, is a vampire story done Hangover style. A woman wakes up unable to remember the previous night and retraces her steps to piece her memory back together. Along the way though, she discovers some unusual hangover symptoms. This was a fun take on a vampire creation story with an interesting dynamic among the young human couple and the immortal vampire couple, both of which have their own relationship problems. Penny’s second date has the pleasure of watching “The Slaughter House”. It’s the traditional tale of a group of hippies that are taken in by some backwoods hillbillies in an area where people have been reported to go missing. But that’s about where tradition ends (I’ll not give it away, but this twist is by far the best part of the film). Great effects and kills in this segment make it even more enjoyable, even if there are some odd CGI effects to some of the kills. This last segment also stars horror veterans Sig Haig and Jeffrey Combs. In addition to these great talents, Ohio grown pro-wrestler Al Snow turns in a fantastic performance, and delivers my favorite line of the film: "You wanna Pepsi?" The set up and delivery of this line actually make me bust out laughing every time. Add to this the fact that a friend of mine actually got to work on this segment, and "The Slaughter House" is by far my favorite part of this film. It alone would get this a recommend, but everything about this movie is worth watching.