Don't Believe the Hype

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Blistering performances.

I really enjoy this quaint charming little oddity of a horror picture, it might be kinda corny and downright dumb in places, but it's also genuinely edgy and even a little daring at points too, and it has a great creepy child performance in young Sammy Snyders, who is very effective in his role and holds pretty much everything together himself as a disturbed and lonely young boy who discovers a way to rid himself of his enemies after finding a pit deep in the woods that's full of mysterious yellow eyed monstrous primeval beasts that are very hungry! The last time I watched this I really couldn't stop thinking about how much more effective a viewing experience it would have been if the plot had been retooled just a little so that it turned out that Jamie had been murdering people all along and dumping the bodies into the pit, and the "Trol-lol-logs" had just been figments of his warped imagination and a way of justifying himself. That was what the movie was screaming out to happen in my book, it would have clearly been so much deeper, darker and meaningful that way. If they'd have had the balls to go with the more psychological route I'm certain the movie would have gone down as more of a classic, not to say that it isn't a classic to those who love it, I like it a lot, I find it to be a lot if strange old school fun, but if it fails, it fails the hardest because of the horribly mishandled tone and plot structure. It feels like a movie of two halves, you have the dead serious stuff like the intensity of Snyders and his crazy eyes and his voyeuristic tendencies and obsession with *adult* naked women, and then you've got the goofy whimsical music playing while an old lady comically gets dumped down the pit, and then it really changes things up when the monsters briefly get free to go on a little rampage and feast on sunbathers! Anyway it's not exactly ideal but it is worth watching for Sammy Snyders. You do feel for his character at first when you see how the horrible neighbourhood kids treat him like dirt and the ignorant adults who should know better judge and dismiss him as "no good", but then as his more deviant behaviours come to the fore and he's essentially a murderer it makes it pretty hard to care too much when he eventually meets his own demise via a little classic grim poetic justice at the hands of another disturbed child... Kooky, creepy, and a little bit deranged, this cool little gem is well worth checking out if you've never seen it, it's a fun flick, never quite seen anything like it. X

Eric Deighton's review of the Pit** warning spoilers**This was the most interesting of the four films reviewed by this group in 2017. Early on in this film I really thought that the troglodytes in the pit were purely in Jamie's imagination. That would have been an interesting twist. Unfortunately, the monsters in the pit are real and a rather unimaginative monster movie is presented to us instead of a more subtle psychological thriller/horror movie.Upon second viewing of the film, it occurred to me that perhaps there is an even more interesting twist in this movie. While on its face, this movie portrays Jamie as a "little pervert", upon closer examination a lot of the adult females in this movie really act inappropriately around this 12 year old boy. Lets begin with Jamie's teacher, Ms. Lynde. She busts Jamie for bringing a nude photography book into school and then looks through the book in front of Jamie and when he finishes writing on the blackboard she tells him to "rub it off and then go home". That must have been music to his perverted ears.The next inappropriately behaving woman in Jamie's life is the librarian, Marg Livingston. She acts throughout the movie like she has some terrible secret she is keeping. In the beginning of the movie she has already received a love letter from Jamie that contains her a photo of her own head crudely pasted onto the naked body of a woman that Jamie cut out of the nude photography book. But Marg keeps that letter until the nude photography book is returned. At that point she knows for sure that Jamie is the person who sent her the letter, but she tells no one, not even Jamie's parents, who are apparently her neighbors from across the street. While Marg Livingston warns her niece to stay away from Jamie, she describes him only as "distressing". Worse still, Marg Livingston agrees to strip naked in front of her front window when she receives an obviously taped phone call from Jamie. In the taped phone call Jamie mispronounces her niece, Abigail's, name in his trademark fashion as "Abergail". Marg Livingstone obviously knew it was Jamie watching her from outside her front window and stripped nude nonetheless. Hell, how could she have not seen him? He was right outside her window taking Polaroids. What's worse Marg Livingstone never reports Jamie to the police or his parents for his late night photo session.The next inappropriately behaving woman in Jamie's life is his 24 year old live in babysitter, Sandy O'Reilly, who walks around the house in the tiniest, sexist little nightshirt after she has already been warned of Jamie's sexual curiosity. She also sleeps with her bedroom door wide open and her breast hanging out of her shirt. Worse still, she agrees to bathe a naked 12 year old horny boy?!?!?! Who does that? Why does she tell Jamie that "its bedtime and bath time as well" in the first place? Come to think of it, in the first scene in which she meets Jamie, she sees him go under the table to stare up her skirt and she uncrosses and opens her knees to give him a better view and then smiles at him after he gets busted by his father. Even after she knows his sexual interest in her, she walks around Jamie wearing nothing but a shower towel.Creepiest of all is Jamie's mother, Mrs. Benjamin, who tells Sandy O'Reilly that her husband thinks that she spends to much attention on Jamie. Jamie tells Sandy O'Reilly that his mother hand bathes him several times a day and wonders if he really is as constantly dirty as his mother insists as justification for the excessive bathing. Jamie's mother is clearly aware that Jamie has stalked previous female baby- sitters and yet hires 24 year old Sandy to watch him. Yet at the end of the movie, Jamie goes to live with his grandparents. Did his mother abandon him?Interesting facts about the making of this movie:*This was a Canadian made movie but it was shot in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. *Jamie was played by child actor Sammy Snyder who never acted again after this film but went on to be a professional dancer. Sammy Snyder left the set after shooting was finished for the day and hung out at a local disco. * Sandy O'Reilly was played by actress Jeannie Elias, who never did another feature film but did many iconic cartoon character voices throughout the 1990s. * Screenwriter Ian Stuart believes that his story was basically ruined in the final version of the film because he had Teddy Bear's voice and the monsters in the pit as purely Jamie's over active imagination. Over time, the imaginary creatures became so real to Jamie that he insisted they were real and when his babysitter/caretaker became frustrated at this nagging insistence and slapped him, everything in the film from that instant until the final scene in the doctor's office occurs only in his mind. The end of the film was supposed to be a big reveal that there was never actually anything in the Pit. At the end we know that nobody who died is actually dead and are all busily going about their lives as they always did. Both the ending and the entire vibe of the film turned out to be completely different from what he wrote. *Director, Lew Lehman never did another film and his wife forbid him to be present to film any of the nude scenes in this movie. Inexplicably, his own daughter, Jennifer Lehman, was cast as the skinny dipper that is carried off by the troglodytes. Director, Lew Lehman, was permitted by his wife to personally film his own daughter's unnecessary gratuitous topless scene.

"The Pit" follows a young adolescent boy, Jamie, who is an outcast in his bucolic small town; his only friend is a teddy bear, he has an unusually focused sexual interest for his age, and his classmates pick on him incessantly. When his parents leave town for an extended business trip, he is left under the care of Sandy, a psychology graduate student who is babysitting to make money. Jamie bonds with her (and also becomes romantically obsessed), and lets her in on his hidden secret: an ominous pit in the woods that is home to a group of carnivorous creatures.Walking the line somewhere between "Carrie" and "Gremlins," (the latter of which it predates), "The Pit" was an unexpected surprise to me. I went into it (no pun intended) with considerably low expectations, given that everything from the synopsis of the film to its poster art scream "really awful '80s movie," so I anticipated little, but found quite a lot to like here. Make no mistake—this film is pretty ridiculous—but it's also quite well-done and takes itself just seriously enough to not implode. If one can get past the silliness of flesh-eating troglodytes being fed local townspeople by a disturbed young boy, the film is insanely enjoyable.While the special effects of the creatures are somewhat dated, and the entire premise utterly insane, "The Pit" no less manages to be engrossing largely due to its lead performances from Sammy Snyders and Jeannie Elias. The scenes between Jamie and Sandy are some of the most interesting (and disturbing) in the film, and set a sinister tone that permeates throughout; the quieter scenes at home are where the pair's acting really shines, and the character dynamics are most vividly realized.The film also gets major points for managing to be suspenseful as the creatures are fed victim after victim—everyone Jamie has been scorned by. It's all headed somewhere grim, and the tension between Jamie and Sandy increases as his antics grow more and more twisted. It's also a very nicely-shot film with some beautiful compositions, and a fantastic, bucolic setting that is rich in atmosphere and lends it a late-'70s Americana feel. The conclusion to the film is unexpected and provides one final jab at the audience that steers from the expected formula.Overall, "The Pit" is a hidden gem of a horror film, and is a mild triumph in its own right. It's the kind of film that takes itself seriously yet requires the complete reverse of its audience. If one can suspend their disbelief, there is a finely-crafted, atmospheric monster movie here. Granted, it is far from scary, but it is ridiculously entertaining, consistently sinister, and never once fails to keep one's attention. It's held up rather well for a film that ascribes itself to such a fantastical premise. 8/10.

12-year-old Jaime (Sammy Snyders) discovers a pit in the nearby woods that houses four carnivorous monsters (he calls them Tralalogs). For whatever reason, he decides these monsters need to be fed and he goes about tricking anyone he deems bad into the pit. Did I mention Jaime is a pervert who has a teddy bear that speaks to him? File this one under "They sure as hell don't make 'em like this anymore." I can't fathom anyone making a horror flick like this nowadays, especially casting a real 12-year-old in the perverted lead role. Snyders is either one hell of an actor, or he really was this odd when they were filming. Imagine a pre-teen Crispin Glover with a bowl cut. Apparently the original script had the monsters exist only in Jaime's mind, but director Lew Lehman (one and done after this) changed while the film was made.