Frank and Penelope

If it was the Nineties and Sean Patrick Flanery had made Frank and Penelope, the first thought would be, “Well, he’s trying to make his own version of True Romance.” After all, he’ll always be synonymous with breakout hit-turned-unlikely cult fave The Boondock Saints (currently heading for a second sequel). His crime drama that was swept up in the Tarantino Witch Trials, where every film with black humor, gunplay, and morally ambiguous heroes was seen as a Pulp Fiction rip-off.

Texas-shot Frank and Penelope definitely has those Clarence and Alabama vibes, as wide-eyed, innocent Frank (Budinich) comes home mid-cuckolding and sulks off to the the nearby strip joint, where shift-closer Penelope (Cowan) gets that $25 drink out of him, and unlikely love blossoms. The kind of love that ends up with someone in a hospital, where a nurse (Eddy) recounts the trail of passion and blood in the journal of the mysterious bed-bound and bandage-swathed writer.

Even if Frank and Penelope just devolved into the standard schmuck-and-the-stripper road trip, then the clear spark between Cowan and Budinich, and the surprisingly bitter-tender dialogue that Flanery and co-writer John Thaddeus give them, could get over its dated, dusty, noir nature Instead, it’s the radical left turn into not one but two Texas horror tropes: the mysterious hotel and the backwater cult, both run by sun-blanched messiah Chisos (Schaech).

It’s an intriguing attempt to smash together a bunch of genres, and the deeper it gets, the more fun it becomes. A coterie of characters spiral around each other in looping subplots (again, very post-Tarantino) with just enough idiocy and horror to keep the audience on its toes, hoping that these two crazy kids can make it work, or at least make it out alive. If there’s one element of Nineties cinema that you’ll really wish Frank and Penelope had kept around, it would be shooting on film, since celluloid adds a layer of grit and grime that just works so well with this kind of story, a layer that the kind of modern digital cinematography available to exploitation-level cinema just can't emulate.

And yet, somehow, there’s more than a little bit of fun to be had in this oddball little throwback, filled with mischievous glee and a sullied heart of gold.