October 2013 Edition #5: THE DEAD PIT

Director: Brett Leonard
Screenplay: Brett Leonard & Gimel Everett
Starring: Jeremy Slate, Cheryl Lawson, Stephen Gregory Foster, Danny Gochnauer
Release Date: February 1989


Despite it’s admittedly awesome cover art, I was not at all looking forward to watching THE DEAD PIT. “From the director of LAWNMOWER MAN and VIRTUOSITY” is probably one of the worst selling-points in movie-marketing history, but that is how Code Red DVD has chosen to sell Brett Leonard’s directorial debut, his stepping stone towards a career that would revel in poorly rendered CGI mediocrity. I should not have been so quick to judge, however, as despite it’s questionable pedigree THE DEAD PIT turned out to be a surprisingly fun if ultimately forgettable zombie flick, filled with all the gooey viscera, gratuitous nudity, psychotic nuns, and other cheap thrills one would hope to find in an exploitation film from this era.

Just come this way and I'll help you find your pants.

The film opens with a prologue set twenty years in the past at the vaguely-named “State Institute For the Mentally Ill”, leading me to assume this takes place in the same state as Springfield.  Dr. Ramzi (Gochnauer) is a deviant, performing invasive brain surgery and other sickening procedures on his hapless patients in the basement of an abandoned wing of the facility,  tossing their bodies into a pit when he is done with them. When Dr. Swan (Slate) discovers Ramzi’s hellish lair, he shoots the insane doctor in the head, throws the body into the pit with all of his victims and seals the basement up, fearing the blow the news of this could do to the facility and his career. Twenty years later a young amnesiac who refers to herself as Jane Doe (Lawson) enters the facility, claiming her memory was taken from her by a demented surgeon. Upon her arrival the facility is struck by an earthquake, breaking the seal of the demented surgeon’s lair and setting him free to go on an undead rampage, continuing his unnatural experiments on the patients and the staff all while taunting Jane, with whom he seems to share a past.

The first forty minutes of this flick are a bit of a slog to get through, bogged down by the oppressively unpleasant atmosphere of the asylum and the, at best, mediocre performances from Gochnauer and Slate. Brett Leonard comes off as a poor man’s Renny Harlin in these early scenes, seeming to borrow the setting of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 3, and marrying it with the stylish camerawork and music video-infused aesthetic of Harlin’s NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 4, complete with groan-inducing one-liners from Dr. Ramzi. Of course the NIGHTMARE series was at the apex of it’s popularity when this film was produced, so most horror film’s of the day were guilty of stealing a few elements from that franchise, but that doesn’t make this particular film seem any less derivative.

 There were only two things in the first 2/3’s of this flick that were able to hold my interest. One was Stephen Gregory Foster’s performance as Chris Meyers, a former demolitions expert whose penchant for blowing stuff up has landed him at the institute. The sanest person in the building, he’s the only one willing to believe Jane. In true David Warbeck-ian fashion, Foster lets his British accent do all of his acting for him, which is fine because his is the closest thing to a subdued, charismatic performance we get in the flick, which leads me to the other thing I liked. Cheryl Lawson as Jane Doe is fairly bland, each line of dialogue landing with a wooden thud. Instead, she opts to let her tiny tank top and revealing underwear do all of her acting, showing up in scene after scene needlessly undressed and, in one nightmare sequence, getting hosed down boobs-first by a cackling nurse until her top flies off. Clearly this scene was very important to Brett Leonard, as it goes on for at least half a minute longer than it needs to, and for that I salute him!

I'm beginning to notice a pattern.

Things don’t really kick into maximum overdrive until the last half hour, when Jane is fooled by Dr. Ramzi into entering his lair, at which point he finally makes this movie earn it’s title, resurrecting all of the unfortunate denizens of his pit of death, and from here on out this movie is Zombie City! The ghoulish horde descends upon the hospital and begins ripping the brains from the skull of patients and nurses alike. Leonard was obviously working with a small group of maybe a few dozen extras here, but was able to wring as much atmosphere and carnage as he could from these scenes to maximum effect through the use of copious amounts of fog machines and excessive backlighting. There are some truly nightmarish images in this block of the film, including a nice dread-filled bit in which Dr. Swan follows an upsetting guttural moaning a bathroom, where he discovers his head nurse grinning maniacally, her tongue ripped out of her skull. I was not expecting this level of zombie mayhem, so count me as pleasantly surprised. Eventually Dr. Swan must confront Ramzi and do penance for his crimes in grisly fashion, while our Jane and Chris concoct the most absolutely bug-shit insane, yet totally logical method of defeating evil I’ve ever seen in a horror flick. They simply get a crazy psycho nun to bless a nearby tower, then detonate a small explosive on one of it’s legs, causing the structure to collapse on top of Ramzi’s devilish den and flood the entire place with holy water. HOLY SHIT!!

Despite a rocky start, Leonard manages to save the day in the second half of this flick, delivering some solid thrills and a heavy dosage of gloppy gruesomeness. If nothing else, the movie looks fantastic for it’s tiny budget, a fact that no doubt lead to his future major studio endeavors. But barring that, THE DEAD PIT is a fiendishly fun relic of a bygone era, when prosthetic effects were at their most pustulent and repulsive and independent filmmakers recklessly begged, borrowed and outright stole from each other in an attempt to up the ante in terms of grisly genre fare. It ain’t high art, but I’ll be goddamned if it wasn’t a blast to watch!

My Rating:

7/10

But, I can't go......my pants are out there!