Jamie (Sammy Snyders) is a disturbed and socially stunned 12-year-old boy with only one friend: his teddy bear, who he has daily conversations with. When he tries to connect with other kids in the neighborhood, he only gets met with a suckerpunch or just public humiliation. He starts to show interest in girls, especially in the older psychology student Sandy (Jeannie Elias), a brunette curlyhead who gets the job of babysitting him when his parents go on a business trip. He falls madly in love with her and does creepy things such as watching her sleep, and writing “I love you“ with her lipstick on the bathroom mirror while she’s showering. Puberty is one helluva drug. And Sandy is just too young and naive to spot any red flags other than getting irritated by his creep behavior. Boys are just being boys, as they say.
Fun fact: The director, Lew Lehman, couldn’t direct the scene in the bathroom since his wife refused him to be in a same room with a naked actress. Lol. He should make a porn after this one, just out of spite.
Anyway: Jamie is also a prankster, who glues the face of the local librarian, Marg, on a page from a nude photography book. Har-har. If that sounds harmless, well, then listen to this: Jamie one night gives the woman a phone call, telling her that her niece has been kidnapped, and if she is going to be released, Marg has to strip in front of the window so he can snap some Polaroid photos of her.
And then there’s this mysterious pit out in the forest, hence the title, that only Jamie knows of. And at the bottom of the pit, which I’d guess is only three meters deep, live some small monstrous creatures who’ve escaped from the puppet storage of Charles Band. Joey calls them Tra-La-Logs and buys raw meat from the local butcher shop to feed them. Why? Who knows. Fun fact: the pit creatures were originally called Troglodytes, but were renamed after being misspelled as Tra-La-Logs. Sounds like something that Claudio Fragasso would name his beaver pet. Screenwriter Ian A. Stuart didn’t like that as it sounded silly. And if that sounds silly, regarding this film, then you’ve seen nothing yet. From here on I’d just recommend going into this strange anomaly of a film blind, because, well, just trust me.
When Jamie no longer can’t feed the Tra-La-Logs with meat, he tries to drag a cow to the pit with no success. The next option: bring people to the forest and push them into the pit. He even brings the pit an old lady in a wheelchair where the tone suddenly shifts to an absurd silly comedy where the only thing missing is the Benny Hill theme song. Yeah…
The Pit was originally meant to be a serious and realistic coming-of-age horror thriller about a preteen boy with murderous fantasies. Director Lew Lehman had other plans though, and wanted to make…god knows. Here we basically have three films: a dark psycho drama of a boy growing up to be a Ted Bundy, a silly comedy, and a standard creature feature like Critters. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. I’ve seen some wild tone-deaf horror movies, but so far, this one takes the cake. The wooden acting, the overly dramatic and sometimes goofy misplaced score doesn’t help much to take this seriously. It’s the pure definition of a Bruh what the fuck am I watching movie, plain and simple.
Director: Lew Lehman
Writer: Ian A. Stuart
Country & year: USA, 1981
Actors: Sammy Snyders, Jeannie Elias, Sonja Smits, Laura Hollingsworth, John Auten, Laura Press, Paul Grisham, Wendy Schmidt, Andrea Swartz, Edith Bedker, Lillian Graham
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086113/
