The Pit (1981) New World/Horror RT: 96 minutes Rated R (nudity, violence, gruesome images) Director: Lew Lehman Screenplay: Ian A. Stuart Music: Victor Davies Cinematography: Manfred Guthe Release date: October 23, 1981 (Canada) Cast: Sammy Snyders, Jeannie Elias, Sonja Smits, Laura Hollingsworth, Andrea Swartz, Lillian Graham, Gerard Jordan, Paul Grisham, Wendy Schmidt, Laura Press, Richard Alden, J.R. Zimmerman (as “Jack Zimmerman”), Sandy Kovack, John Stoneham, Jennifer Lehman, John C. Bassett, John Auten, Cindy Auten, Edith Bedker, Patrick Patterson, Era Keil, Marvin Keil, Allison Tye. Box Office: N/A
Rating: ***
There seems to be some confusion on when the Canadian horror film The Pit was released in the lower 48. According to IMDb, it was October 23, 1981. Wikipedia says June 3, 1983. The copyright year on the poster is 1984. I really don’t remember it playing in cinemas at any point. I know I saw the box on video store shelves in the 80s, but I never rented it. If I’d known then how truly twisted and weird it is, I would have snatched it right up. But never mind what might have been; the point is I’ve seen it now and it is one seriously f***ed up flick!
Directed by one-movie wonder Lew Lehman, The Pit is a strange hybrid of psychological horror, revenge movie and creature feature. It centers on Jamie Benjamin (Snyders, Huckleberry Finn and His Friends), a disturbed 12YO boy with enough issues to put a child therapist on the Fortune 500 list. He’s not a popular kid in his school or neighborhood. Even his own parents don’t seem to want to be around him. His only friends are the animals in his terrarium and his teddy bear Teddy (no points for originality there). It’s one thing for a kid to talk to his teddy bear; it’s quite another when it talks back. That’s what happens here. It isn’t harmless banter either. Teddy encourages Jamie to do some awful things, but we’ll get back to that.
Mom (Press, Head Office) and Dad (Alden, The Sadist), not likely to ever be named Parents of the Year, leave Jamie in the care of an attractive college-age babysitter named Sandy (Elias, Nomads) while they’re on an extended business trip in Seattle. They do this even though they know their kid has issues that go beyond the normal preteen angst- e.g. his obsession with older women and the naked female body. The lengths he goes to in order to get a glimpse of boobies are unbelievable, even for a hormonal adolescent. He puts the horndogs in the Porky’s movies to shame.
ANYWAY, it takes no time at all for Jamie to become fixated on Sandy. He sneaks into her bedroom to watch her sleep (boobie shot!), writes “I love you” in lipstick on the bathroom mirror while she’s taking a shower (ooh, side boob!) and constantly attempts to woo her. If you think it can’t get any creepier than that, think again. When Jamie goes to take a bath, he asks Sandy to wash his back just like Mom does. Apparently, she has a thing about her son being “dirty”. Could it be he’s somehow being abused by his mother? I can’t answer that because the movie doesn’t.
Jamie’s got a secret, a deadly one. Before I get into that, I’d like to elaborate on the abuse he puts up with every day of his life. It’s awful. He’s constantly mocked by a bratty little girl (Swartz) with a big mouth. An elderly neighbor in a wheelchair (Graham, Agnes of God) gives him a hard time for even the smallest infractions like just standing on the sidewalk. When he asks a classmate (Grisham) if he can join his club, he’s rejected in the form of a hard punch in the face. I don’t normally take the side of bullies and I won’t start now, but I can see why nobody wants to be friends with Jamie. He really is a creepy little weirdo. He already shows all the signs of a future sexual offender. Now he’s about to let us see his homicidal tendencies. This is where the revenge part of the story comes into play.
In a clearing in the woods, there’s a big hole, the titular pit. In it, there are five nasty little creatures Jamie calls “troll-o-logs”. They look like deranged Ewoks with yellow eyes. As Jamie soon learns, they are carnivorous and need meat to survive. When he can’t afford to hit the local butcher shop anymore, Teddy gives him a capital idea. Why not feed people to the critters? Jamie’s okay with the idea as long as they’re bad people. He starts luring his tormentors to the clearing where they somehow manage NOT to see the huge gaping hole right in front of them and fall in where they’re devoured. One of them is Sandy’s football hero boyfriend Allan (Jordan, Funeral Home), as much the victim of a certain green-eyed monster as the little yellow-eyed ones.
You’d think the locals would be freaking out over multiple unexplained disappearances in their safe small town, yet nobody seems terribly concerned. At the very least, shouldn’t there be missing posters for the brat? Life goes on as usual until the creatures escape from the pit. You have Jamie to thank for that. He’s the one who sends them down a rope after he’s no longer able to feed them himself. He figures this way they can hunt for their own food which is exactly what happens. It’s only when they kill a skinny dipper and her boyfriend that local law enforcement finally jumps into action. Top cop Sgt. McNally (Zimmerman, Tommy Boy) rounds up a posse to hunt and kill the murderous mini-monsters.
Where’s Sandy during all this? So glad you asked. In yet another unsolicited romantic gesture, Jamie confides in her the secret of the troll-o-logs. Naturally, she doesn’t believe him. Who would? He takes her to the pit to show her. When she sees them, she says they have to tell somebody. It’s the zoological find of the century. That’s when fate intervenes. Sandy accidentally falls into the pit and gets eaten up while Jamie watches helplessly. When police ask him about her disappearance later, he lies and says she ran off with her new boyfriend. Didn’t take her long to get over Allan, did it?
The Pit as we know it didn’t start out that way. Originally, the screenwriter Ian A. Stuart (another one-movie wonder) envisioned it as a serious psychological thriller with the creatures being a figment of the young protagonist’s imagination. In addition, Jamie was supposed to be around 9YO. That all changed when Lehman signed on to direct. It became this goofy horror movie with little monsters and a possessed teddy bear. Oh, did I forget to mention that? At one point, when Jamie leaves the room after conversing with his stuffed pal, Teddy turns his head by himself. W….T….F?! I don’t have an answer for that either; it’s another thing the movie never bothers to explain. It isn’t even brought up again.
Now I could sit here and ask all sorts of questions pertaining to logic or lack thereof where The Pit is concerned. For example, how is it that nobody notices a young boy wildly pushing a screaming old lady through the neighborhood in a wheelchair? Somebody had to have heard that racket. Also, how dumb are the people in this town? They must be on the lower end of the IQ spectrum seeing how easy it is for Jamie to lure his victims into his trap. I said I could ask such questions, but I’m not going to. Why ruin a perfectly good trashy Canadian horror flick? Never mind that it was actually filmed in Wisconsin.
It also seems pointless to critique the acting, but therein lies a real surprise. The performances in The Pit aren’t all that bad, at least not for the genre. Snyders, while a bit wooden at times, does the creepy weird kid thing quite well. Elias, who mostly does voice acting these days, is okay as Sandy, a psych major who doesn’t appear to realize just how dangerous her young charge is until it’s too late. The only actor of note is Sonja Smits who plays Jamie’s teacher. She’d go on to co-star in Videodrome as Bianca O’Blivion. As for the rest of the cast, a lot of them no longer act. A few have only a few credits to their name. For others, The Pit is their only credit. It’s not like any of them are master thespians anyway.
The creature effects in The Pit are pretty good for a low-budget film. We’re talking about pre-CGI filmmaking here, so the evil flesh-eating beasties are brought to life through animatronics. They’ll look fake to today’s audiences raised on CGI, but they look great to this Movie Guy. I just wish the chomp-chomp scenes were bloodier. Lehman really skimps on the gore.
The narrative is something of a mess, but that can be attributed to the script rewrites after Lehman took control of The Pit. There are plenty of hiccups, but the biggest is when Jamie disappears from the story for most of the final act. The focus shifts to the efforts by police and a gun-toting lynch mob to exterminate the monsters once the troll-o-logs go on their above-ground rampage. We don’t see the kid again until the final scene, one with a not-all-that-shocking twist.
What can I say about The Pit that I haven’t about a hundred other low-budget movies from the Golden Age of Exploitation? I enjoyed this cheesy slice of Canuxploitation. It’s right up there with Cathy’s Curse and The Incubus. Trash like this is why I got into film reviewing in the first place. Sure, I like popular favorites like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. Who doesn’t? But my real love is the stuff that pretentious cinephiles avoid like the plague. But you know this already. As such, you understand why I choose to write up dopey movies like The Pit. What they say about trash and treasure definitely applies to cinema.
