Directed by Brett Leonard
Written by Brett Leonard & Gimel Everett
Starring Jeremy Slate, Steffen Gregory Foster, Danny Gochnauer, & Cheryl Lawson
MPAA Rating: R
Runtime: 102 minutes
Available from Kino Lorber on December 14

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

Dead Pit (which is referred to as The Dead Pit pretty much everywhere except for the front cover of this release) is normally the sort of film I’d be excited to dig up. There seems to have been plenty of chatter about it being a “hidden gem” of horror, the kind of fun, low-budget production that horror fans should go out of their way to watch. It was made at more or less the peak of practical effects, helmed by a filmmaking team with a decent amount of name recognition, and promised a lot of intriguing genre elements. For me, though, it just never did anything interesting enough or silly enough to make it worthwhile.

In a prologue we see Dr. Gerald Swan (Slate), a doctor at the “State Institution for the Mentall Ill,” kill his colleague Dr. Colin Ramzi (Gochnauer) after discovering Ramzi’s cruel experiments on patients. Flash forward twenty years and “Jane Doe” (Lawson) is dumped at the now-crumbling facility after being found wandering the streets with no memory. Eventually, we discover Dr. Ramzi has risen from the dead and has brought the subjects of his experiments back with him.

The beginning and end of the film are pretty watchable, it’s everything that happens in between that’s the problem. The action grinds to a standstill once we leave the prologue and move into the main plot, which devolves into a plodding and cliche-ridden story of our heroine being held in a mental health facility. It felt like a collage of everything from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery to the A Nightmare on Elm Street films to Re-Animator, except there wasn’t any glue to hold the disparate parts together. There’s not much to hold audience interest for most of the film, either, aside from a few mildly creepy sequences and a lot of gratuitous skin from Lawson.

The make-up and effects were all pretty effective. Aside from some glowing eyes, everything looked to be in-camera effects and was pulled off  really well, especially considering the budget (IMDB lists an estimated budget as $350,000). I was also surprised to see a pretty decent miniature of the real-world filming location show up in the finale. Speaking of which, The Dead Pit filmed in the same facility in Milpitas, California used as the setting for the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and it does add a impressive layer of menace to the film.

It’s pretty clear, though, that too much of the budget was sunk into those parts of the production and too little went to the casting. Slate was the only member of the cast to come in with any acting experience and, despite getting top billing, he disappears for most of the film, leaving Lawson to shoulder most of the film’s weight. In fact, as you look through the cast and crew of The Dead Pit it quickly becomes clear that it was both the first and last feature for nearly everyone involved, and the lack of experience at all levels really shows.

That there’s much awareness of it at all seems mostly due to the notoriety of Leonard and Everett’s next two projects as a writing/directing/producing team: 1992’s The Lawnmower Man and 1995’s Virtuosity. Unless you have a strong desire to dive into their filmography, I don’t think The Dead Pit will be worth your time.