THE DEAD PIT
Directed by Brett Leonard. 1989. United States.
Sometime in the past, Dr. Swan, a hypnotherapist at the creatively named State Institution for the Mentally Ill, discovered a colleague, Dr. Ramzi, was doing highly unethical brain experimentations on his patients. How unethical? Well, there’s a literal pit of dead bodies beside the operating table. When Ramzi attempts to add Swan to his list of experiments, Swan shoots him dead, seals up the entrance to Ramzi’s hidden lab, and never tells another soul about it.
Now, in the present, an amnesiac Jane Doe arrives at the Institution, claiming that she has not lost her memory, but has instead had her memories taken from her. While being signed in, Jane has her first of many breakdowns, her desperate cries seemingly triggering an earthquake, shaking the building just enough to break open the sealed entrance to Dr. Ramzi’s old lab. Just like that, Jane begins suffering daily hallucinations (or are they?) of a ghoul in a surgeon’s mask stalking her around the hospital, doing the old Michael Myers “now you see me, now you don’t” routine.
Speaking of Myers, Jane meets Christian Meyers, an ex-military demolitions expert. Christian has a fondness for the kindly (and cute) Nurse Robbins, so you can imagine his distress when she goes missing one night. Maybe Jane is right. Maybe the good Doctor Ramzi is back at it, snatching people up and ramming lobotomy probes into their eye sockets. Jane’s therapy sessions with Dr. Swan are starting to bring back suppressed memories. Does she have some kind of family ties to Ramzi?
Of course she does. Don’t be stupid.
Which is something I wish someone had said to the writer of this slop. THE DEAD PIT opens with a nine-minute credit sequence. That should adequately describe the pacing of this film. Calling it leisurely would be too kind. It’s positively geriatric. That’s probably why Brett Leonard has his lead actress, Cheryl Lawson, spend most of the movie in her underwear. In one of her many, many nightmare sequences, Jane gets tied up in a shower and sprayed with a garden hose until her tissue-thin tank top is torn clean off her body. Why? Because it’s easier than generating suspense or intrigue.
I felt bad for Lawson. She’s absolutely giving it her all in a film that isn’t reciprocating. Once the halfway mark hits, the movie leaves the realm of vague slasher psychodrama and dives headfirst into schlock horror, with the reanimated Dr. Ramzi cracking worse jokes than Freddy Krueger as he tosses around severed heads and sticks pins into exposed brains. The film shifts into a full-blown zombie movie at the one-hour mark with a horde of undead mental patients rising from the dead pit to lay waste to the hospital, tearing out the skulls of every poor sucker they can find.
From psychodrama to slasher to rubber reality mindfuck to zombie film seems like a lot of shifts in approach, but we’re not done yet. In the final ten minutes, we shift into some weirdly religious nonsense as the lunatic nun at the Institution discovers that her holy water causes the undead to melt into goo. This leads our duo of Jane and Christian to surmise that they can end all of this by dousing the dead pit in God water. How can they do that? Well, it’s simple, really. They’ll have the nun bless all the water in a nearby water tank, and then Christian will MacGyver together a bomb and blow it up. That will cause the nuthouse to flood, and there ya go. Problem solved.
Oh, and did I mention that Jane Doe is Ramzi’s daughter? What a shocker, right? Surely, that means something. They wouldn’t include that narrative twist if it weren’t tied to the story somehow, would they? Well, yes, they would. The single twist the movie throws at us amounts to nothing. Ramzi was researching the organic causes of insanity brought about by the mind-body problem or something like that. So his experiments with formaldehyde and open brain surgery were trying to achieve… something. How that became demonic and produced zombies is beyond me. Jane Doe’s identity and Ramzi’s motive are both meaningless MacGuffins.
According to IMDb, THE DEAD PIT runs 95 minutes, but my copy ran a full 101 minutes. I don’t know what I did to deserve that. There are certainly moments in the film that I enjoyed. For example, the effects work is pretty good at times, and the gory bits are all nicely done. I loved watching the miniature water tower explode and fall behind the miniature hospital, flooding it with about 500 times the amount of water a single water tower can hold. I liked the effect of the holy water melting the zombies. I liked watching Cheryl Lawson run around in her underwear. Everything else can go fuck itself with a hammer.
THE DEAD PIT is a stinker and a snooze, a collage of genre tropes and cliches without any defining characteristic to make it unique. It’s confused and lethargic, loud and unpleasant, with no clear narrative to keep the audience engaged. There isn’t even a proper ending, just a sequel-bait final shot that thankfully never led to a follow-up. Thank God for that.