![]() ![]() The 35mm image is gorgeous and without fault. The film shot primarily at night is beautifully transferred to Blu-Ray. The 2K Scan from the Original Camera Negative does wonders for this rarely seen cult horror film. The Dead Pit definitely shows the stylistic promise of the director who would go on and begin the filmic CyberPunk subgenre with The Lawnmower Man and Virtuosity. Additionally, the leeriness of having your main hero in her white bikini briefs and halter top for 75% of the film didn’t fly even then. Where the nicest of nurses and orderlies are of the Nurse Ratchet cruelty as the antidote persuasion. This is a film that has patients being firehosed and lobotomized. ![]() The biggest issue is the film’s understanding of mental health has all the cliches and trappings of the 1970s and 1980s. Though even these set pieces either taking place in reality or in fantasy have a twinge of Giallo to them that elevates this from just another indie horror film to something with a bit of style and understanding. What the film and the director excel at are the small hallucinatory visions and nightmares that happen through the course of the film. Leonard’s film is as linear as one can get within the confines of this type of story. It’s up to Jane Doe and fellow patient Christian (Stephen Foster Gregory) to get to the bottom of these stranger and stranger occurrences and for them to end it. Swan seems to care and chalk it up to a “case of the crazies”. After an earthquake, the patients begin to unhinge and revert to almost homicidal actions. Cut to years later and a mysterious patient Jane Doe (Cheryl Lawson) is admitted to the same hospital. Before any more of the “experiments” can occur fellow doctor Jerald Swan (Jeremy Slate) has dispatched him. But the reasons why he is torturing said patients is a mystery we do not really get a chance to investigate. ![]() Ramzi is the type of mental health clinician that loves to torture patients. This One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by way of Night of the Living Dead mash-up is fun but with a huge dollop of suspension of disbelief.ĭr. It can't come soon enough.The Dead Pit is very of its era in its tone, style, and most of all storytelling. It all becomes a dull waiting game that's accompanied by a repetitive, obtrusive score as viewers hope that Mack will eventually find the right door and put a stop to all of this. He looks vaguely annoyed all the time and is mostly in an immobile sitting position. And while Muldoon plays scruffy hero Mack with a blast of energy and a cheeky attitude, Willis' performance is far too static. He's holding hostages and threatening to drown the town because he wants to talk to the cops who were involved with the death of his son and the imprisonment of his other son, which seems like something that could have been accomplished through far less extreme means. We never know where he is or what exactly he's doing.Ĭonversely, Deadlock does explain what the villain's motivation is, and it's. Unfortunately, rather than establishing the movie's space so that we know where everything is in relation to everything else, the movie has Mack running around pretty much at random, climbing up to catwalks, crawling down to sub-basements, and even running across an open field for some reason. The script even copies an idea from Die Hard with a Vengeance: that the hero is doing all his fighting and saving the town while suffering from a crushing hangover. This is yet another Die Hard knockoff - with Willis in the villain role this time - that does just about everything wrong, from strange motivations to poor use of space and an irksome music score. ![]()
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