"Wow," a character says in The Penthouse. "This sounds like the script for a movie or something. It's just unbelievable." She's about a quarter right. The story is too absurd to sound like a movie script. It's certainly unbelievable, I'll give her that much; just not in the way she meant.

David Schifter and Vanessa Ore play Peter and Amanda, a married couple who just bought a penthouse condo. The balcony gives them a panoramic view of the harbor. They use it to peep on the domestic squabbles of Charles and Tess, who live on a houseboat. Michael Paré plays Charles in what one would hope is the worst of the sixteen movies he made that year. (Unfortunately, I doubt it is. Mummy Dearest looks pretty fucking dire.)

Peter and Amanda eventually notice that they haven't seen Tess for a few days. No points to the viewer for assuming she's dead.

A subplot about Charles scamming homeowners serves no purpose whatsoever. It's so irrelevant, Schifter didn't bother to give it closure. It's not even an interesting scam. It's just Charles getting paid for home improvement jobs and never doing the work. Not exactly David Mamet territory.

Peter runs into Charles at a bar and makes some tooth-grinding small talk. He idly mentions that he can see Charles and Tess from his balcony. Charles, who of course murdered Tess a few days ago, starts to worry that Peter might have witnessed it. He didn't, and he doesn't give Charles much reason to think he did, but the script needs some excuse to kickstart a conflict between them. Charles's solution for his imaginary dilemma is to invite Peter onto his boat, then use security video from below deck to frame Peter for trespassing. It's exactly as stupid as it sounds. You'd think a con man who just murdered his wife would be less eager to have cops poking around his business.

Nicholas Turturro plays the type of movie cop who finds a corpse hanging from a rafter and says, "How do we know it isn't a scarecrow?" The unreasonableness of his constant skepticism regarding Peter is tedious. The Penthouse needs him to be this stupid because otherwise Charles's plan to frame Peter would have failed immediately. It's a textbook example of what Roger Ebert called an Idiot Plot. If everyone in the movie weren't an idiot, the plot would have been resolved in five minutes. Every cop on Peter's case seesaws between stubborn disbelief and unmitigated gullibility, wholly dependent on which reaction will keep the narrative from collapsing. Even in the denouement, when Turturro's detective finally gets wise to Charles, he tacitly admits that there was evidence incriminating Charles on the boat, and the cops simply failed to notice it. Not exactly David Simon territory.

None of the dialogue sounds like anything that might come from an actual person. The lame pacing makes it difficult to pay attention, which is fine, because very little of consequence happens. The soundtrack is full of dramatic and suspenseful music playing over scenes that never warrant it. The climax features a stabbing effect that looks like part of an exceptionally cheap Halloween costume. Whenever The Penthouse isn't outright incompetent, it's nondescript.

3 out of 10.

Seen on Tubi.