The Dead Pit

The Dead Pit (1989)

Dir. Brett Leonard

Written by Brett Leonard, Gimel Everett

Starring Jeremy Slate, Cheryl Lawson, Stephen Gregory Foster

            In recent years I’ve become rather inured to the self-destructive futility of routinely (well, a few times a month, anyway) grinding out 5000+ words about some godforsaken 80’s video cheapie I watched on youtube and have already mostly forgotten by the time I post the final product. But it needn’t always be that way! THE DEAD PIT is a movie which could easily merit a word count comfortably in the range of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason if I had any inclination to walk you through the plot in detail, but to do so would almost certainly require a commitment of time and energy so spectacularly in excess of the time and energy which went into the original creation of the story that it would completely defeat the purpose of the thing. THE DEAD PIT was, according to a typically unsourced IMDB “trivia” section, written by director Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett (both of everlasting LAWNMOWER MAN infamy) in a mere three weeks, and I’m betting that even at that they weren’t exactly putting in 9-hour workdays. And in fact, “written” is probably a little strong in this case; “assembled” might be more fitting, as THE DEAD PIT seems to have been not so much written as a narrative story as grafted together from basically every hoary movie cliche available to an aspiring z-movie auteur in 1989.

            If that sounds like a condemnation, though, you may rest assured that it is anything but. Genre filmmaking is built on wholesale thievery, and that’s one of its charms. I consider it a feature, not a bug; after all, I think we would all agree that this world would be significantly poorer without the approximately 87,000 HALLOWEEN ripoffs which proliferated in the early 80s, or the uncountable millions of Italian MAD MAX ripoffs which, by volume, may well constitute the the greatest overall percentage of total films in existence (see the convenient pie chart, below):

 And I mean, the standard format for a Hollywood movie pitch is usually framed as “[famous movie A] meets [famous movie B],” so it’s not like it's just hustling weirdos and Italians that think this way. As in, “It’s INDIANA JONES meets LADYBIRD” or “it’s STAND AND DELIVER meets HOLY MOUNTAIN!” It’s crazy, but it’s true: more often than you’d think, honest to god hard American currency has moved from the hands of some Caligulan plutocrat to the grubby mitts of an enterprising cinematic huckster, with merely the utterance of the words, “it’s STAR WARS meets THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.” Or, in THE DEAD PIT’s case, “It’s HALLOWEEN meets NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD meets ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST meets INFERNO meets DR. GIGGLES meets AMITYVILLE HORROR meets EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!” Nothing with that many competing impulses was ever going to “work” in the traditional sense, as a functional piece of art. But you know what, I’m betting Everett and Leonard weren’t exactly throwing the word “art” around a lot in the pitch meetings for this one. They want to entertain, not enlighten, and, in its own, goofy, daffy way, THE DEAD PIT is indeed pretty entertaining. Anyway, it’s definitely better than LAWNMOWER MAN.

            We begin our tale 20 years ago, at the imaginatively named “State Institution For The Mentally Ill” (state unspecified). The inmates are jabbering and shrieking and banging their heads into things, but honestly the whole facility looks surprisingly clean and progressive considering that the year must be 1969, an era not known for its overwhelming abundance of professionalism in the field of mental health treatment. Unfortunately, things are not going so great amongst the staff, as the smug-looking surgeon Dr. Ramzi (Danny Gochnaeur, THE DEAD PIT) skulks away down a secret flight of stairs hidden in a broom closet, with a patient slung over his shoulder. When his colleague Dr. Swan (Jeremy Slate, TRUE GRIT) protests that this is not the kind of by-the-book mental health care those stuffed shirts up in corporate will stand for, Dr. Ramzi just derisively brushes him aside and and goes straight about his evil business, which of course involves walking down a series of eerie corridors lit by a curiously unsourced green light.

Standard medical practice, so far. But when Dr. Spoilsport follows this brazen young rebel of medicine, he discovers that he’s been carving up corpses with bizarre occult symbols and wiring up their brains to do god knows what. And, uh, this may not be an isolated incident, from the look of the “dead pit” (that’s a medical term, I believe) next to the operating table, which must have at least a dozen bodies in it. “My god, you’re a doctor! You’re supposed to be saving lives,” Dr. No-Fun eloquently protests. “I’ve done life. Now I’m doing death,” says the blood-spattered killer, matter-of-factly. “You’re a fucking maniac!” his colleague rejoins, somewhat less eloquently, perhaps, but not without a certain blunt charm. As enlightening as this lively philosophical debate is, they obviously can’t keep it going forever, so our hero does the one reasonable thing he could do: blow the villain away with a handy revolver, smash cut to title, seal off the hidden door to the laboratory, paint over it, and forget the whole thing ever happened.* Problem solved, right?

            Well, twenty apparently uneventful years pass, so maybe this was a better strategy than I gave it credit for. But alas, as many a chagrined medical institution has discovered, sealing off rooms filled with murder victims for twenty years is not always the practical long-term solution one might assume it to be. There might be an earthquake which opens the long-sealed door and sets the evil doctor free in zombie form, for example. Which is exactly what happens here. In this particular instance, the earthquake coincides suspiciously with the arrival of Jane Doe (“introducing Cheryl Lawson,” “Palmer’s Wife” in J. EDGAR [!] but most notable as a stuntwoman with nearly 40 credited films!) a young amnesiac who protests in the most hysterical manner possible that she’s not crazy and that “I didn’t lose my memory IT-WAS-TAKEN-FROM-ME-I-TOLD-THEM-IT-WAS!!!”

"I know you think I'm crazy, doctor, but..."

            For some reason, this perfectly sensible line of argument does not convince her caretakers to release her, and so she’s stuck in a mental institution, and to add insult to injury they seem to be out of hospital gowns, or maybe they don’t have her size or something, because she’ll be spending essentially the rest of the movie hanging around the mental institution in her underwear, which is a totally normal and medically necessary arrangement I assume.

            The semi-heroic Dr. Swan, apparently still around after 20 years, believes he can cure Jane’s amnesia by using hypnosis to access her deep-seated memories, despite her repeated incoherent shrieking rants that she’s perfectly fine, she just had her memory stolen by mysterious vaguely-defined shadowy enemies who lurk around invisibly menacing her at all times. Swan’s theories about hypnosis and repressed memories sound scientifically dubious, and we already have reason to entertain serious doubts about his crisis-time decision making, but he seems like a pillar of sanity next to Jane, who does not help her case that she is fine by running around in her underwear hallucinating and screaming about an evil doctor with glowing eyes constantly watching her. Could it actually be, for once, that the highly trained medical professionals are right and the woman in underwear shrieking about how she needs to be released from a mad house to escape invisible enemies is wrong? Of course not, don’t be a dope. This is a horror movie from the creators of THE LAWNMOWER MAN, so obviously she’s right: not only has the long-dead Dr. Renzi returned from beyond the grave as red-eyed ghoul, but he’s skulking around the hospital picking off the staff one-by-one as they wander around vulnerably in the eerie, empty abandoned wing of the old madhouse. And you’ll be surprised to hear that he has a shocking secret which relates to her mysterious past.

             The movie comfortably idles in slasher mode for much of its runtime, as Dr. Renzi racks up his body count and only Jane seems to suspect anything is wrong. It’s nothing special, but the movie benefits immensely from director of photography Marty Collins (a modest career of mostly video shorts and tech credits) who takes the opportunity to indulge in plenty of gaudy visual styling, from noir-ish abstract hard light geometry to Argento-esque impressionistic colored lighting to more esoteric conceits like shooting through a stylized keyhole. It’s perfectly ridiculous, of course, but so’s the movie, and the histrionic visual style deliciously reflects the ludicrous hodge-podge of story and the over-the-top performances (particularly by Lawson) which drift across the line to camp early enough to qualify to vote there by the time the credits roll. In fact, from the gaudy visuals to the alien performances to the slasher structure to the basic dramatic premise about a young woman who is witness to a crime no one believes, it’s got most of the essential ingredients for a perfectly respectable giallo, albeit an unmistakably American one. It even has some laudable gore, though sprinkled perhaps a bit too stingily throughout to compete with its Italian brethren.

            And then the zombies show up. Now, nothing leading up to this point suggests zombies in any way, and by the time they show up nearly everyone in the supporting cast has already been killed by the slasher, so they don’t have much to do but shuffle around grabbing at without ever quite grasping our protagonists. But zombies there must be, so zombies there will be, dammit, and I fear I do not have it in me to criticize that logic. There isn’t quite the budget for gnarly grotesqueries (they’re saving it for not one, not two, but three pretty awesome head meltings -- literally the same amount as RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC, an alpha dog move if ever there was one) so the undead shufflers are pretty much just bald guys in hospital robes with gray facepaint and blood smeared on them, lurching around in a pack. They’re fine, but not independently cool or important enough to the plot to warrant much discussion... except for two small details.

First, though they seem to struggle with opening doors, they apparently manage to successfully disable an entire parking lots’ worth of automobiles in about two minutes flat (“Damn, the distributor's gone! For dead people, they sure are smart,” bemoans the British guy who I forgot to mention earlier [Stephen Gregory Foster, LAWNMOWER MAN]). I dunno if they were all resurrected car mechanics or what, but good job on that one, fellas, that’s some real hustle. Secondly, these may actually be the only cinematic zombies I have ever seen in a non-parody who actually do want to eat brains. Or at least take them out and hold them.** Can it really be that a mere four years after RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, this idea (absolutely not found in any of Romero’s zombie films) had already taken hold so firmly that something like THE DEAD PIT felt obliged to throw it in there with no explanation or narrative purpose?

Anyway, all this leads to some ridiculous business with an insane nun blessing a water tank full of holy water and the world’s most unexpected WHITE HEAT reference. It’s a bit too dreamy and dawdling to quite manage an adequate climax, but at least the Killer seems to be having a good time. One time he’s holding a severed head and then says “I’m the head of surgery.” Later, he hands Jane a bloody disembodied brain and says, “Dr. Swan wanted to give you a piece of his mind!” These dad jokes actually make perfect sense when we discover Jane’s horrible secret: the awful Dr. Ramzi is, in fact: her father! How exactly this works and what happened to her memory and what it has to do with an earthquake or a dead pit or experimental brain surgery, let alone zombies, is never a question the movie even briefly considers (in fact, that British guy even points out the obvious: “that earthquake was a natural phenomenon, this [zombie doctor situation] is supernatural!” to a room which falls awkwardly silent, and then changes the topic), but come on dude, just go with it, it’s way too late for anything to make sense at this point, so why not savor one last inane, inexplicable flourish?

If THE DEAD PIT has any real flaw, it has to be… well, OK, basically everything, from the idiotic dialogue to the hilarious performances to the free-associative narrative to the chintzy tiny homemade model of a hospital that bravely stands in for the establishing shots. But if it has a flaw that actually hurts it, it’s unfortunately the antagonist, who can’t seem to summon the discipline to stick to a gimmicky MO or offer even the barest gesture towards what he’s actually trying to accomplish or what his deal is. I mean, is he back for revenge? If so, what does that have to do with his secret daughter’s amnesia, and for that matter how was he responsible for her memory loss when it happened before the earthquake which we’re explicitly told set him free? What was he trying to do with all that experimental brain surgery, and does it have anything to do with his supernatural return? And what’s up with all those zombies, was this somehow part of his plan, or is that just a happy accident? And do they work for him, or are they just unrelated zombies who don’t interfere with whatever he's got going because he’s a ghost or wizard or whatever and has no brain for them to remove and fondle? And what’s the deal with the bodysnatching final stinger? Is that what he’s been trying to finagle all along, or was the nun in on it the whole time, or what? Lots of things don’t matter at all in a movie like this; narrative logic, believable acting, realistic dialogue. But you gotta do a better job selling the basic conflict, and the only way to do that is to successfully define who your villain is, what he wants, and how he works. Without that, you’ll never make it to THE DEAD PIT 2: RAMZI’S RAMPAGE.

Still, it’s an easy flaw to overlook in light of the rest of the bounty THE DEAD PIT provides. It’s chock full of colorful weirdness, gratuitous violence, and misguided ambition, and all that combined with its gaudy visuals and dreamy plotting adds up to an agreeable cocktail indeed. In fact, this is exactly the sort of thing which is absolutely ripe for rediscovery by Arrow Video, or Grindhouse, or Scream Factory or somebody who wants to give it a handsome Blu-Ray release with a bunch of interviews with the actors (who, with the possible exception of Lawson, clearly know what kind of movie they’re in and look like they’re having a good time with it). And if all that ain’t enough to make you look more kindly on the creators of THE LAWNMOWER MAN, let me sweeten the detail: the original VHS box featured a zombie with goddam glowing eyes. Not all of these reviews need to be 5,000 word long, but sometimes, just sometimes, a movie really earns it.

This is weird, because it's actually a plot point that Dr. Ramzi's eyes glow red, but there's no green eye glowing or glowing zombie eyes of any kind in the film. They came so close to getting it right!

(Bonus: IMDB reviewer Molly Celaschi apparently believes there are such things as "Brett Leonard fans interested in his filmography" and manages to pick out the three most mundane logical gaps in a movie which features extraneous zombies) 

*“Hadn’t thought of it in 20 years,” says Swan 20 years later, apparently having taken his Yoga instructor’s advice to “live in the moment” perhaps a hair too literally.

** Alas, they do not moan braaainnns, BRAAAAINNNS, but there’s no denying that the removal of this organ appears to be their main goal. Besides taking distributors out of parked cars, anyway. Wait, do they think that’s the car’s brain?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	They’re Out, says the VHS box, noncomittally. But the theatrical poster is better: When the Dead Start To Walk, You’d Better Start Running… THE DEAD PIT… Drop In Anytime.
TITLE ACCURACY	There’s a dead pit, sure, why not.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	All
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	No
NUDITY?	Sadistic nurse chains our hero up in her underwear and sprays her boobs with a firehouse until her shirt comes off. But this is revealed to be a dream -- in fact, our hero’s dream -- so we can assume that it’s not just shameless T ‘n A, because who would dream about their own boobs for purely prurient reasons? She does spend nearly the entire movie walking around in her underwear, as is totally normal in a mental institution.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Definitely zombie, although I’m not quite sure how to categorize the undead Dr Ramzi, who seems to be some sort of ghost wizard but was apparently solid enough that a locked door kept him quiet for 20 years.
POSSESSION?	I think it’s the implication of the final shot?
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Well, it is a mental institution
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Melting!
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you’re ever involuntarily confined to a mental institution because invisible supernatural enemies are attacking your brain, stay strong and remember YOU’RE RIGHT AND EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG.