In the Canadian horror film The Pit, Jamie is one of those rare kids who does know his ass from a hole in the ground. That’s because the insufferable 12-year-old boy (Sammy Snyders, The Last Chase) has discovered the titular site in the woods, in which carnivorous troglodytes dwell and hangrily await food to fall in for the gnawing.
Having zero friends and being sexually frustrated makes for a lethal combo, as Jamie uses the wide cavity to his own advantage, leveraging it for acts of cruel revenge. Whether someone has picked on him, insulted him or romanced his live-in babysitter/therapist (Jeannie Elias, Deadline), it’s into the hole! His means of luring each victim to their gravity-assisted doom — and their inability to see the double-wide abyss directly in front of their feet — stretch the concept of suspension of disbelief to its breaking point, which makes the movie even more fun. (Also pushing us in that direction? The oompah-style score comedically punctuating such sacrifices as Jamie dumping a blind old lady out of her wheelchair.)
The lone fiction feature for director Lew Lehman (who wrote John Huston’s feeble Phobia the year before) and screenwriter Ian A. Stuart, The Pit is filled with situations that challenge common sense and ideas that come half-baked — for example, did I mention Jamie’s teddy bear is apparently sentient? Therefore, this one’s best viewed as a wildly whacked-out-of-its-gourd metaphor for puberty. A major player in Bad Seed cinema, Jamie is not only overly petulant and thoroughly unpleasant to be around, but sends pornographic images to the hot librarian (one-and-doner Laura Hollingsworth) and later tricks her into posing for some of his own via Polaroid. The kid is irredeemably abhorrent.
If you don’t want to cheer at the Canuxploitation chestnut’s final shot, we shouldn’t be pals anyway. —Rod Lott