Review: The Pit (1981)
Directed by: Lew Lehman
Starring: Sammy Snyders, Jeannie Elias, Sonja Smits
Written by: Ian A. Stuart
Music by: Victor Davies
IMDb
This 1981 Canuxploitation flick is something else. Jamie is a 12-year-old loner and a weirdo, who’s not handling puberty well. He’s got a pervy fixation on nearly any woman in his orbit, and his only friend is a demonic teddy bear, Teddy. Teddy regularly advises Jamie to peep on nearby females and throw people who’ve wronged him into a pit in the woods, so they can be eaten by ravenous creatures Jamie calls tra-la-logs. (Lo Pan’s hairy creature in Big Trouble in Little China bears a lot of resemblance to these pit trolls.) Jamie does unhealthy things like watching his babysitter sleep, writing love notes on her bathroom mirror while she showers, and asking her to wash his back in the tub. So yeah, Jamie makes for quite the character. As if the premise weren’t preposterous enough, things are weirded up further by an amorphous tone that often goes from creepy to playful to ludicrous in the course of a scene, helped (not sure that’s the right word) by a score that is often in juxtaposition to what’s going on. Many of the characters are badly drawn caricatures, other than Jamie and his babysitter, Sandy, who are surprisingly nuanced for a movie like this. The pit is some kind of metaphor for the angst of pubescence, I think, though the movie makes the interesting choice of having the tra-la-logs be real creatures, which I guess was a deviation from the original script. Over time, the movie also loses sight of Teddy, which is kind of unfortunate. But I understand it’s gotta be hard to balance so many fucking crazy, disparate elements. Near the end, The Pit takes a little detour once the tra-la-logs escape and go on a rampage. I would have preferred a focus on Jamie’s descent into madness — but then again, maybe that’s what the whole rampage is meant to represent: Jamie losing control of his murderous urges? I’m probably over-examining this movie, but that’s what’s so fascinating about it: At the same time it presents an absolutely absurd series of events, it invites an robust, somewhat validated meta-textual analysis. This is a movie that constantly has the audience wondering whether its ridiculousness is accidental or intentional. Anyway, this is a very interesting and strange horror movie and I highly recommend it.
Rating: 8.5 out of 10