Review: The Dead Pit (1989)
Directed by: Brett Leonard
Starring: Jeremy Slate, Cheryl Lawson, Danny Gochnauer
Written by: Brett Leonard, Gimel Everett
Music by: Dan Wyman
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Dark Force Entertainment)
IMDb
Director and co-writer Brett Leonard has had an interesting career in genre film. He’s probably best known for two ahead-of-their-time-but-now-woefully-dated sci-fi flicks, The Lawnmower Man (1992) and Virtuosity (1995). He also botched an adaptation of the Man-Thing comic in 2005, before comic book flicks fully sashayed into fashion. But his debut, The Dead Pit, is probably his most successful work. It’s kind of famous for its VHS cover, which featured a zombie with eyes that flashed green when you pressed a button. That neat-o gimmick was enough to move a few units, but the film actually stands on its own pretty well. At its core, the movie — about a murderous mad scientist who has figured out a way to return from his own death — is a zombie movie, but there are heavy gothic overtones and a sci-fi bent that shoves it into EC Comics territory, a vibe I love quite a bit. That’s not to say The Dead Pit is low on resurrected corpses dismembering the living; it’s actually got plenty of that, and a healthy share of impressively gooey gore gags. Leonard plays everything straight and keeps things eerie through set lighting, a spooky synth score, some religious mumbo-jumbo, and a creepy performance from Danny Gochnauer as the handsome undead doc. The screenplay never bothers to explain what the dead pit is, or how it ties into the lunatic doctor’s diabolical experiments, but a giant, indeterminately deep hole in the ground that emits a sinister green glow as it spews forth living corpses ravenous for flesh works for me without a proper backstory. The movie is about 15 minutes too long and is mostly bereft of any sort of character development, despite some half-assed attempts to create mystery around Cheryl Dawson’s “Jane Doe.” But who cares about any of that when you’ve got so many melting faces, crushed skulls, ghostly swirling mists, icy keyboard arpeggios, and maniacal cackles? The Dead Pit is doing absolutely everything it can to make you forget the entire movie takes place in one location, and in only a few different areas within that location, with only four characters whose faces you’ll remember when the credits roll. Honestly, this is low-key one of my favorite ‘80s horror flicks that isn’t considered an outright classic. It’s got a similar thrust as another mad scientist riff I adore, Dead & Buried (1981). Anyone with a fondness for the decade owes it to themselves to visit the dead pit.
Overall rating: 8 out of 10
