The Pit

Back at the end of September, I was up in New Brunswick for my friend Stephanie’s birthday party. At the restaurant we were at, there was this family that had two little hellions that were racing around the entire restaurant completely unrestrained by their parents. Eventually I took matters into my own hands, and when walking back from the bathroom, as they were chasing each other around an empty table, I expertly positioned myself and kneed the boy right in the chest, knocking him on his ass to teach him a valuable lesson about when not to misbehave. Why am I sharing this story with you all? Well, it’s partly because I just really like sharing that story, but mainly because the boy that is the main character in this film is so goddamned annoying I wanted to give him the same treatment.

There’s not really that much to the movie, it’s just a tale about a creepy little twelve year old boy that lusts after adult women and feeds everyone he doesn’t like to a group of troglodytes living in a pit in the woods. I assume, at least, that they’re troglodytes, since that’s what the DVD case calls them. The boy just calls them “trollollogs”, which I can only assume is what troglodytes are called when speaking in Retard. His main crush is on his roughly college age babysitter, no doubt because she pronounces the first syllable of paleontologist like ‘pal’ instead of ‘pail’. Am I nitpicking? Well, it’s hard not to when the movie gives me no other healthy alternatives. That plot description I gave? The one that goes on for one sentence? That’s the entire damn movie, barring one brief stretch where he drops a rope to let them out so they can find their own victims. It’s atrociously acted, particularly by the children in the film, with me not being able to care about a single person. Seriously, there’s an enormous hole in the ground, and he lures his victims into it pretty much by taking them through the woods into the clearing the pit is in and letting them just somehow ignore their own eyes and fall into it. Sure, the old blind lady he kills has an excuse, but the rest are just actively trying to die here. Then, after they’ve died, he happily takes a souvenir from them like a proper serial killer (the old blind lady’s wheelchair, the mean little girl’s bicycle, etc.). Of course, even ignoring that he’s killing people, we can’t sympathize with the stupid little boy at all, as he keeps doing just horrid things, like calling a woman up and telling her that her daughter’s been kidnapped and will be killed if she doesn’t strip for him right then and there so he can take some Polaroids. Of course, his fun just had to be ruined by the killjoy little girl, who walks in after her mom has gotten topless. No wonder she had to go.

I am honestly baffled as to whom this movie is supposed to appeal to. It brings nothing to the table. On a filmmaking level it’s below amateurish, as I (am probably everyone reading this) can name student films that were made more professionally. On an acting level it’s pretty dire, on the level of a cheapo exploitation movie it’s one of the worst I’ve seen, and I do generally make it a habit to see quite a few of them. It’s just a terrible film all around.

Rating: Zero stars