The Dead Pit (1989)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
A demented doctor is doing experiments on mentally ill patients at a hospital. Another doctor learns of the experiments and kills him, leaving his body in the basement. Twenty-years later an earthquake causes the evil doctor to return to life and soon his experiments continue.
If you were around in the video store era then you probably saw THE DEAD PIT on your local video store. The movie was a major staple back in the day and the amazing looking case is something that grabbed your attention even if you weren't a fan of the genre. With that said, the film itself certainly couldn't live up to that VHS cover and the end result certainly isn't something I'd recommend.
The biggest problem with this film is that there's really not much going on for the first hour. At 101-minutes, the film is way too long for its own good and especially since there's nothing going on during the first hour. We're introduced to the mad doctor. We're introduced to the current Jane Doe (Cheryl Lawson) who lives in the updated mental hospital. The majority of the running time has her running around, screaming and basically being scared of something in the hospital. This gets very boring very quickly.
The film finally comes to life during the final thirty-minutes when all Hell breaks loose. This is where the good stuff happens and that includes plenty of gore, zombies and some violence. If you're a fan of the zombie genre then I'd still recommend this movie but I'd keep the remote handy so that you can fast-forward to the finale. These final scenes are certainly a lot of fun and it helps that the energy level picks up.
THE DEAD PIT is a very flawed movie but I give director Brett Leonard credit for at least making the finale good. It's really too bad that the first hour didn't have a better pacing to it and it's really too bad that it took so long for the zombies to show up.
