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| Courtesy of Kino Lorber |
Jack-of-all-trades actor/composer/director
Lew Lehman’s filmmaking career began and ended swiftly with his one and done
feature film debut: the 1981 Canuxploitation creepy-child flick The Pit. A strange slice of Canadian horror-comedy as
a sort of coming-of-age story originally intended to be far more serious psychological
horror fare by screenwriter Ian Stuart, The Pit arrived and vanished
without much noise before being forgotten until rescued by the good folks at
Kino Lorber and going on the Shudder streaming service. Seen now in today’s climate of
archeologically unearthing every horror picture under the sun, the film is an
uncharacteristically squirm inducing little number that also happens to have
prehistoric troglodytes running around in it, one that manages to veer into
tonal areas ranging from highly disturbing to absurdly hilarious.
Twelve-year-old Jamie Benjamin (Sammy
Snyders of Huckleberry Finn and His Friends) is maladjusted and ostracized from his
fellow schoolmates and neighbors, the result of poor parenting, constant moving
from town to town and less than friendly babysitters with only his “talking” teddy
bear for companionship. One day out in
the woods nearby, he stumbles upon some kind of deep underground pit housing
centuries-old creatures with glowing eyes.
Rather than tell anyone about it, he tries stealing meat from the local
grocery store to feed them and soon “under the influence of teddy” seizes the
opportunity to hit back at the very society which rejected him by luring his
enemies into the pit to their deaths.
The Pit presents a patently absurd concept originally intended as a
more serious investigation of autism and unhealthy coping mechanisms giving way
to sociopathy by screenwriter Ian A. Stuart before Lew Lehman moved the project
closer to comedy. Unlike the screenplay,
Lehman’s film features real (instead of imagined in the screenplay) monsters in
it and a third act that threatens to undo everything that came before it. A real shame that whatever kinds of awkward
intensifying horrors involving a prepubescent sexually misguided antisocial
youth are squandered on a third act that seems to devolve into a small town vs.
armada of monsters but what does work manages to nevertheless seep beneath the
skin of the viewer.
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Undeniably carrying the whole
icky-feeling thing on his shoulders, Sammy Snyders gives viewers one of the most
dysfunctional child screen villains ever attempted at the movies and speaks to
darker, deeper undisclosed horrors as we try to imagine just how he came to be
this way. When the film works on this
dynamic between a queasy co-existence between his hot older babysitter Sandy
(Jeannie Elias), including a truly nauseating exchange between the boy being
bathed by Sandy, the film is positively squirm inducing and debatably paved the
way for the more pedophilic discomforts transgressed in Todd Solondz’s Happiness. Whatever areas of sexual dysfunction you
could imply in a child character in the movies at the time, Sammy Snyders and
director Lehman blast right through them guns-a-blazing.
Tonally speaking however the film is
all over the map, switching freely between gross awkward prepubescent lusting
and goofy screwball humor forecasting the Looney Tunes monster movie antics to
come in Joe Dante’s Gremlins. The
soundtrack by Victor Davies is mostly dark and ominous but then goes for candy
colored comedy clowning around in moments that will have you guffawing. The cheapness of the monsters, later said to
be shot in a studio instead of in the Beaver Dam, Wisconsin locale, tends to
work against whatever seriousness the film was shooting for and the abrupt
shifts between horror and comedy threaten to pull the film apart though
whenever the film sides up with the creepy kid it gets back on track.
Though Ian A. Stuart expressed
dissatisfaction with how far the end result got from his original screenplay,
with the monsters being real as opposed to figments of the kid’s imagination, The
Pit is nevertheless a strange but interesting hybrid of Canuxploitation
horror-comedy that features one of the most sick-inducing child acting
performances ever put on film. Before the
film came out a novelization of the original screenplay by John Gault, using
the film’s working title Teddy instead, was released and adhered to Ian
A. Stuart’s original treatment completely.
Maybe one day someone else will try and adapt the story again as written,
but what we have here is a unique little horror movie that manages to make you
laugh impishly and shrivel up in disgust in equal measure.
--Andrew Kotwicki
