Creator: John Logan
462 minutes (18) 2016
Widescreen ratio 1.78:1
Universal DVD Region 2
Rating: 8/10
Reviews by Tony Lee & Steven Hampton
Although partly
inspired by The League Of Extraordinary
Gentlemen (Alan Moore’s graphic novel more than Stephen Norrington’s movie
adaptation), John Logan’s Penny Dreadful
posits tales of Victorian heroes in fantasy horrors, instead of sci-fi/ fantasy,
and plays like a period version of short-lived TV series Demons (2009). As we might expect from the screenwriter of The Aviator and Hugo (both directed by Scorsese), the period details of this
BritisHollywood TV series are frequently a bit too colourful to be fully
authentic, but there is a charmingly presentable grittiness to location
shooting in Ireland that adds some visual poetics. With derivative gothic
plotlines - where science and superstition collide - this eight-episode postmodern
mash-up of Stoker, Shelley, and Wilde, etc. is an entertaining batch of London
legends boasting many deliciously uncanny images and splattery gore moments.
Timothy Dalton, as
explorer Sir Malcolm, is the leader of an uneasy alliance with mysterious
psychic Vanessa (genre goddess Eva Green), and American gunslinger Chandler
Although heroine
Vanessa appears subdued, at first, second episode Séance gifts us with the full intensity of the amazing Miss Green
taking on a spirit-channelling role (“if one is to engage with the primordial
forces of darkness... expect a bit of social awkwardness”), that will not be
forgotten easily. Alun Armstrong is very good as the amusingly polite Grand
Guignol showman Brand who calmly recruits Frankenstein’s monster Caliban as his
theatre rigger. A couple of episodes feature the very welcome presence of David
Warner as Prof. Van Helsing, who is consulted by Dr Frankenstein.
Closer Than Sisters is a great flashback episode guest-starring Anna
Chancellor as Vanessa’s mother who struggles to cope with her tormented
daughter’s bouts of catatonia and violent seizures. Again, Green turns in a
haunting performance - especially during her character’s brutal, harrowing
‘treatment’; proving that Green is a fearless, astonishingly expressive star
capable of out-acting what few peers she has in the genre she’s made her own.
“How dare you presume to speak to me of death?” Later, when Vanessa starts
suffering Carrienetic fits, perverse
guilt and quest puzzles converge into a moral crisis under threat of our
heroine becoming “the mother of evil,” while she’s in urgent need of an
exorcism.
With excellent
production standards, and story-lines that critique but also celebrate a range
of literary sources, this blows away all the cobwebs from costume-horror movies
and most modern-day efforts, too. Of course, the season’s finale has dark pasts
of the main characters catching up with them and drags unfinished business into
the spotlight. But it exposes their flaws and shows us their strengths instead
of simply following after clichéd patterns of fight-the-fantastic behaviour,
and so revels in the “the glory of suffering.”
[TL]
Penny Dreadful: Season Two continued in much the same vein
as its impressive debut, showcasing flashbacks with currency and spotlighting
some rural gothic chapters just as much as the urban scenes of uncanny contrasts
with the dawning of a modern, scientific age. Season three, Penny Dreadful: The Final Season closes
this horror series, and it certainly bows out with plenty of shudders and
shocks.
Depressed
recluse Vanessa begins visiting a shrink, under whose care she demands and
responds to hypno-therapy with theatrical nightmares about secret devils. As
usual, Eva Green portrays the matchless archetype of a tormented heroine. And,
even with rasping breath from surviving asylum tortures, her husky voice is a crispy
dark chocolate liqueur, except for when she goes into levitating witchcraft
mode with she howls like a banshee.
The obsessive
Frankenstein and ambitious Jekyll team-up for some bold experiments to cure
the inmates of Bedlam. Dorian enjoys his operatic threesomes, painted in
villains’ blood. Dracula stalks the British capital where he spawns black-eyed anaemic
followers that scuttle about like plague rats, hunting and haunting Vanessa,
even during daylight hours. Playing an Apache mystic, Wes Studi puts in a fine
guest appearance. Brian Cox makes a fist of his role as wealthy patriarch
turned family tyrant whose belligerence now dictates a limited future for his
prodigal son Ethan. Sir Malcolm travels from Africa to find cowboy Ethan under
outlaw circumstances in the USA London
Tones of
melancholy are broken only natural wonders, desperate promises of salvation for
distressed or diseased souls, and once-innocents’ fond memories of better life
found mainly in dreams. The programme’s title is used ironically, of course, as
if it is offering a penny for humanity’s deepest darkest thoughts. The price of
admission must be paid in pounds of torn flesh or gallon buckets of blood. It’s
full of dread, not dreadful as artistic entertainment. The wrongly perceived lowbrow
culture of malignant horror is elevated to supremacy with references to poets
Tennyson and Wordsworth, exploring grim alleyways off the road to
scientifically utopian immortality (“an eternity without passion”). This
delivers subtle pleas for tolerance of unsubtle moral differences, that enables
redemptive action for bad men and tragic monsters. Penny Dreadful brings together all the
classic creatures of the horror genre, re-imagined for our post-Clive Barker
era of new Hammer styled hells raised up to the rafters.
As the
poisonous fogapocalypse descends (foreshadowing WW1's gas attacks), the heroes arrive in a
dying metropolis that swarms with predators. Cauterising bite wounds is only
the start of several drastic measures against overwhelming evil. Latecomer to
the party, feisty Cat (Perdita Weeks, one of the Bennets from Lost In Austen) is a death-defying asset
in the final battle. At a time when horror on TV remains unduly sanitised (The Originals), often bowdlerised into
fanciful clichés (Supernatural), or
simply modernised by the pointlessly garish (From Dusk Till Dawn), here’s an intelligent gothic period drama
serial that never shies away from the impolitely grotesque, the casually brutal,
or the knowing humour of its atmospheric scenario.
[SH]
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