The Pit (1981)/Shudder

 A couple weeks ago, this was in rotation on Slashics, so I caught different parts of The Pit before setting down to watch it Wednesday afternoon before revisiting The Fog on Fog Day. I'll include my old user comments from January 2010 as well. This film is really a warped movie. It has some elements to it that just make you want to take a shower to scrub it off. Jamie is such a sleazy twelve year old boy, he ducks under the table to look up his sitter's skirt to peek at her panties before his father jerks the creep out from under there. He intrudes on the sitter's shower to cop a look-see, while writing I love you in lipstick on the mirror. He calls a librarian to get her to strip for photos he takes with a Polaroid camera by using a prerecorded tape at a phone booth claiming her niece had been kidnapped! He lures those who poked fun at him or who upset him to a pit in the woods a mile from his house housing prehistoric furry carnivorous flesh eating creatures with yellow eyes! He talks to a Teddy Bear, the thing responding back in a sinister voice, encouraging Jamie towards homicidal behavior. Yes, before Ted, there was The Pit. The poor sitter is really a sweetheart with good intentions who just happens to take a job where the kid she is paid to look after is a deviant outcast with serious sexual hangups. That twist at the end where he moves and thinks all is well until the little girl he befriends from next door invites him into the woods is added just so for irony alone. That Jamie frees the creatures and they go on a killing spree...I don't think that works as well. It's just that the less we see the better but I get that after a while the idea he could lure more and more folks to the pit seemed farfetched. The sitter's fate was very unsettling... Jamie really did lead her to this fate. The little shit.

Rolling the wheel chair grandma to the pit and provoking the girl with the bike to the pit, not to mention, the sitter's football hero, in a montage was so preposterous it works for this particular movie. But the early 80s small town suburban neighborhood feel of the film really is easy to immerse myself in. And the Halloween party on the street with the kids as Jamie leads a bully to his death, revenge for punching him in the nose, with dumping the little girlfriend into the pit as well is a memorable scene. The librarian's niece tricking Jamie with kindness about riding her bike, as he falls from it as it collapses into a heap, with her laughing, is not cool but he makes it easy to side with others because he's such a sociopath sleazeball.

Just Jamie watching his sitter's breast while she sleeps, her chest breathing up and down, freaking her out as she wakes up, or sending his librarian a letter with her face planted of a cutout nude picture from a provocative art book as he watches her disgusted reaction from outside the window tells you plenty about this boy. 

When Teddy turns its head in the bedroom after the sitter leaves, that is quite an off-the-wall moment, certainly defining what kind of film this is.