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john cribbs

THE DEAD PIT

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Personally, I think the movie's undead creatures look really good – they rival the ones in Re-Animator as the most underrated zombies in horror movie history. Interestingly, they're not cannibalistic. Instead of consuming their victims, they just dog pile on them and rip them asunder. When you think about it this take on the zombie makes more sense than the better-known modern flesh-eating variety popularized by George Romero. After all these guys have been lying around in a pit for 20 years, why start eating now? The decision to make them vegetarian zombies must have been a budget constraint – if that's the case, it works in the movie's favor. It's a good move on Leonard's part: why waste money on gore effects that are going to turn out subpar and/or cheesy when you can spend the money on other things that make the film look professional like great-looking zombies? Or concentrate the special makeup effects on two or three big pieces like the ol' dental drill through the eye gag? Most of the deaths happen off-screen, but the sense of terror is upheld by the quality effects we do see. With considerations like these it's no surprise that Leonard would go on to have a successful career making a lot out of a little.

Leonard also made intelligent budget concessions in the costume department, having Cheryl Lawson spend the entire film wearing only a white cut-off tank top and matching French-cut bikini bottoms. An excellent directorial choice any way you look at it.

I'll quickly transition here from lowbrow to scholarly by suggesting that Jane's lack of wardrobe could also be symbolic of the how exposed she feels inside the institute. (Do you buy that?) She also feels frustratingly out of place: as she points out, "I can't remember my past - that doesn't make me crazy!" She's surrounded by howling madmen, lecherous orderlies, a doctor who doesn't believe her oblique stories of alleged brain tampering and another doctor with glowing red eyes and claws who disappears before anyone else can see him before turning up outside her window holding a decapitated head. And the problem with being in a nuthouse is, when you tell your newly-appointed therapist you saw a blood-splattered surgeon with glowing red eyes and claws the size of full-length pencils standing in the middle of the lawn outside your room who threw a decapitated head at your window, he doesn't believe you. In fact he's even less likely to believe you if you're a patient in an institution as opposed to just some random person on the street claiming a clawed, red-eyed surgeon threw a head at them. In the real world such a claim may warrant the slightest suspension of disbelief, long enough at least to wonder if said stranger just escaped from an insane asylum, but actually in an insane asylum? No way. You're on your own. So naturally she feels a little exposed, mentally as well as physically.

Even less exposed is her past, which is dished out in brief flashbacks Jane experiences while hypnotized during therapy sessions run by Dr. Swan. The mystery of Jane's identity (which by the way is blatantly obvious but Leonard has enough respect for the audience to not make a big deal out of the eventual revelation... think Empire Strikes Back) is directly tied to these projected memories, most of them of a young girl being hastened away from a playground by her mother due to the presence of an unseen observer. How Ramzi and his army are revived isn't exactly clear but if it was the psychic-earthquake seemingly caused by Jane, it could be a resurrection manifested directly from her "removed" childhood trauma. By the end of the movie this mob of monster memories has completely overrun the building, ripping hapless staff members to pieces. Not too many institutions like this offer psychological healing via zombie orgy – hopefully she appreciates it. Much more therapeutic than the cold hose shower she receives from a cackling nurse at any rate.

The tension builds to a biblically epic finale where Ramzi sets the army of undead (or, projections of young woman's mental trauma) loose in the institution and sets aside some personal time to practice embroidery on Swan's amygdala. In probably the best scene of the movie, Jeremy Slate lies unmoving on the operating table, his face displaying a wide array of emotions – happy, sad, scared, pleasured, confused – as Ramzi manipulates the various lobes and neurotransmitters in his naked brain. It's a weirdly intimate scene that Slate plays absolutely straight, cooing like a content baby one second then wincing like a pathetic alcoholic. Only a couple frames in length, it would be ripped off ten years later in the only memorable part of Ridley Scott's Hannibal but here silent acting proves more power than corny dialogue. And creepier.

In the end Jane's inmate buddy, a swarthy bearded fellow with a theatrical British accent who earlier confided in her that he's a demolition expert who likes to go a little too far with his explosions, finally gets to blow something up. It turns out that one of the asylum patients, a raving woman running around dressed as a nun, has the power to turn regular water into holy water, which harms the assaulting horde – actually, it melts their faces. So in a neat turn, the demolition expert has her bless all the water inside a giant water tower outside the institute then uses his keen demolition skills to blow it up and flood the grounds with the enhanced, purifying waves, sending the zombies back to the grave where they belong.

Just the year before in 1988, another talented filmmaker who'd make his way up to directing big box office fare had released a similar "haunted institution" film. Renny Harlin's Prison, his first American film and therefore a debut of sorts itself, featured a penitentiary whose current inmates find themselves being stalked by a statically-empowered former convict who fried in the electric chair 30 years ago… or so they thought. Like the parallels between Jane’s mental health and the outbreak of rioting ghouls, the killing spree of Prison's Charlie Forsythe (which is also ostensibly aimed at revenge against the authority figure who killed him but claims plenty of extra victims along the way) is materialized from the casual brutality of prison life in general. Leonard and Harlin both understand the group mentality found in institutions that stifles individuality and could potentially manifest into chaotic slaughter. Pit's hospital-as-torture chamber theme, complete with hose-handling sadistic chief nurse in the tradition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, suggests that the mere mechanizations of institutions make them transposable to one another; a corrupt or incompetent health care system is no different than a badly-run prison. The only chance the individual has is escape from whatever embodiment the mentality of institutionalization takes shape as, be it a red-eyed neurosurgeon gripping a bloody scalpel in his clawed hand or a glowing telekinetic ghost with a grudge and a lot of deadly voltage at his fingertips. Jane never learns her real (first) name and never fully recovers the memory of her past, so when she emerges from the debris of the State Institution for the Mental Ill she's almost reborn, a new identity and hopeful future.

Maybe I'm being too kind to a movie that (it turns out) was written in one week, but even if I didn't know anything about Brett Leonard coming into it, I'd still feel his direction brings a lot to what could have been a standard zombie outing. Besides an expert handling of the usual horror movie techniques – panning down to reveal a sinister person, things popping up subtly just outside the frame of tracking shots – Leonard really thinks about his shots and gives them epic, big budget movie treatment. And he is not afraid of the wide-angle lens.

The Dead Pit is basically Brett Leonard's take on a Nightmare on Elm Street style horror film, which is a good pairing – Leonard should have gotten a chance to direct one of those, as Renny Harlin did after Prison. Now that they're starting the series over again maybe he can! Cyber-Freddy… I'm into it.

APPENDIX, or What I Learned Later

The Dead Pit's original trailer has a number of choice taglines, all recited in that great, urgent 80's monotone voiceover. My favorite is "The distance between the depths of a damaged mind and the depths of hell is no greater than the thickness of a door... and now, the door is open!"

The movie is a favorite of the great Joe Bob Briggs, who called it an "excellent zombie-rama" and awarded it four stars. Highlighted in his drive-in totals was the "close-up brain surgery, with spurting" and "formaldehyde fu." He didn't like the zombies as much as I did, calling the makeup "derivative - basically George Romero zombies with the herky-jerky Spastic Stomp." I understand what he's saying, but I liked them.

The idea for the murderous Dr. Ramzi comes from Brett Leonard reading about trans-orbital lobotomies administrated to housewives in the 1950's by a man named Dr. Gerald Freeman. He also remembers being scared as a child by the cold neurosurgeon who operated on his mom, who had brain cancer.

I honestly think this film is more deserving of the title Dr. Butcher MD, but The Dead Pit is a pretty funny one (Leonard states he thought it was a good title at the time and now can't imagine what he was thinking).

The scantily-clad, shriek-happy Cheryl Lawson was a trick horse rider when she auditioned for the film on a fluke. Since then she's worked as a stunt woman on Joss Whedon's TV shows and high-profile movies like Spiderman 2. She had a cameo in Virtuosity, demonstrating Leonard's loyalty to his actors: Stephen Gregory Foster (the accented male lead) and Jeremy Slate also had small roles in The Lawnmower Man. Danny Gochnauer's role as Dr. Colin Ramzi was his first and last.

Leonard remembers with great fondness seeing as a young boy the scene in True Grit where Jeremy Slate cuts off Dennis Hopper's fingers.

When he started pre-production on The Dead Pit, Leonard was working in a natural health food distribution company. He and a friend had teamed up for a Super-8 feature called Serious Problem (or, No Turning Back) which was never finished. He tried to get a movie going called Deception, based on the reported interest of Rae Dawn Chong, but it fell through at the last minute. A producer hired him to shoot action scenes for a stalled film called Deadlock and was so impressed he offered to set Leonard up with a $150,000 budget to shoot a 35mm horror movie using the same location. "You got a script ready?" the producer asked. "Yes - yes we do," Leonard responded. He and his writing partner went home and pounded out the screenplay for The Dead Pit in one week.

I've got to say, although the movie is clearly budget-constricted, $150,000 seems remarkably low considering the finished product. It absolutely holds up 20 years later (woah... the movie came out 20 years ago... and in the movie 20 years pass until the return of Ramzi. Sequel time!) But seriously, it's an above-average feature horror debut. The acting is good, the camerawork precise and professional, and the zombies look great. It's not hard to see why Leonard went on to bigger things, and why today he states "I am as proud of The Dead Pit as any film I ever made."

This movie reminded me how great Leonard is and made me wonder what he's up to these days. Next up (and this is really exciting) he'll be directing a re-launch of the Highlander series, the fifth film of the franchise subtitled The Source, starring Adrian Paul and In Bruges' Thekla Reuten. That sounds like a really good match-up, and I'm genuinely excited for it to come out!

Oh, it already came out in 2007? Whoops.

The Dead Pit was recently released on dvd, but I seriously doubt the zombie eyes light up...

COMING SOON...

THE KILLING OF SATAN!

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