Cheryl Lawson

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) Another entry in the “not good, but interesting” horror film category, The Dead Pit at least has the pleasant madness of not quite knowing what it’s all about. It starts with a mad scientist, continues with a young girl being stuck in a psychiatric hospital with wild hallucinations, and ends in zombie-movie mode with the undead rising from the dead. It’s a lively blend of elements, and it marks an interesting debut for writer-director Brett Leonard, whose career was consistently interesting (there’s that word again) throughout the early 1990s. As a mixture of genre elements, it often feels like a collage of other better movies, but that’s got charm as well: Echoes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest blend into Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and then on to a Re-Animator zombie hospital thing. Cheryl Lawson does look nice and screams even more nicely here as an inmate fighting against the undead menace and their mad master. While The Dead Pit is ultimately not as compulsively interesting as similar lighthearted horror cult movies, it does work well in a pinch as something reasonably entertaining that you have (likely) never seen before. I can think of far worse example, and that’s only in the movies I’ve watched this week.