The Pit (1981)

WOW. I mean, really, just wow. The Pit has so many incredible ingredients for a delicious horror pot pie: creepy kid, talking toys, ancient monsters... Jamie, our creepy autistic kid, has no friends, and we learn this fact in the first 30 seconds as he gets punched in the face for no apparent reason other than his creepiness. Then we learn on one of his solo retreats into the woods, there’s a giant pit in the ground where his only “friends” live, and by “friends” I mean ancient, meat-eating creatures no one has seen before. He gives them obvious name, tra-la-logs. I take back what I just said about friends, his other friend is his talking teddy bear. You might think the bear’s consciousness exists only in his mind, but once, and only once, we see it move as it gives Sandy, his babysitter, the stink eye for doing the laundry.


Many of the events in The Pit really could have been in Jamie’s mind, you’d think, until in a moment of weakness, Jamie gives the tra-la-logs a means of escape, a rope! From this point on, we lose Jamie for a while and the tra-la-logs start to terrorize townspeople like any good monsters do. I wouldn’t ask too many questions at this point, like how did these creatures survive eons in a hole before Jamie started pushing appetizing peoples in, or how this gigantic hole in the ground remained hidden in plain view for the same length of time, or why no one went looking for the missing people, or any number of other reasonable questions. Anyways, the film does have a satisfying end, but at that point, you’re just kind of glad it’s over. Check out one of Jamie’s victims below:



And for all his creepiness, all the terrible creepy things he says and does, Jamie is not the creepiest thing about this movie. It’s the little things, for example how Sandy agrees to bathe him in an awkwardly lengthy scene. She just scrubs his back over and over and over and...Even creepier is the fact that director Lew Lehman’s wife, Mrs. Lehman, forbid him to film any of the movie’s nude scenes except for one...the quick skinny dipping scene toward end starring his daughter! Come on Lew!


Good news for everyone, Jamie, Sammy Snyders, is no longer creepy, he’s a dancer!

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