The Dead Pit
The Dead Pit (1989) Rewatch: ✅
“He smells like death”
Bit too late for peak VHS, The Dead Pit still has enough of the hallmarks of a scare movie that’s the perfect fit for late night video watching. It’s also complete bollocks in that “last years of the eighties and heading into the nineties, where has all the money gone from films” kind of way.
It’s fantastic and shite in the most incoherent, inconsistent ways possible. When it concentrates on the evil glowing eyes surgeon from hell stuff, it’s brilliant. When it tries to do anything remotely dramatic set in the asylum, it’s absolutely atrocious. Stephen Gregory Foster seems to be acting in an entirely different film from everyone else lending an already hallucinatory film that extra level of weirdness whenever he’s onscreen. Which is a fair bit, really.
It’s the inconsistency that does it in, really. It’s got some great gore, when it wants to it can ramp up the tension and the zombie surgeon with their pit of reanimated corpses is kinda horrible in all the ways they need to be. You’ve just got the rest of it to contend with inbetween.
Personally, I don’t mind too much. A few years later and it’d have probably turned out the most awful straight to video nonsense but here, it just about sneaks under the radar before things went a bit toss and scrapes through just on the right side of schlock nonsense. It’s helped in no small part by the rather simple fact that I’m a sucker for gratuitous zombies in a film and there’s plenty here.