I've just watched one of the weirdest movies that I have ever seen, after having first heard about it just a few hours earlier when it was mentioned in a video collectors group on Facebook of which I'm a member. Apparently a cult film in Canada where it was made, it's variously entitled The Pit or Teddy, was directed by Lew Lehman, and released in 1981. Its plot is virtually indescribable, but here goes anyway.
The Pit focuses upon a lonely, friendless, 12-year-old 'problem child' named Jamie Benjamin (played in superbly unsettling style by Sammy Snyders) living with his parents but shunned by the townsfolk who consider him creepy and not right. He is certainly disturbed psychologically, showing an unhealthy, blatantly voyeuristic interest in nude women, particularly his latest in a long line of live-in child minders, a pretty young psychology student named Sandy O'Reilly (Jeannie Elias), who plans on studying him for her research, and upon whom Jamie swiftly develops a major crush.
Other than Sandy, however, Jamie talks almost exclusively to his teddy bear, Teddy. So far, so strange, but here is where it gets much stranger. For when they're alone, Teddy talks back to Jamie, with an eerie voice (think Ted, but Twilight Zone Ted). Obviously, this is all in Jamie's head, we assume – until one scene comes along where Sandy has just made Jamie's bed for him while he's out somewhere, then absentmindedly says "Bye, Bear" to Teddy as she closes the door, leaving the room empty, whereupon Teddy slowly turns its head and looks at the door! Spooky! Yet nothing is ever made of this bizarre subplot strand, leaving the nature of Teddy unexplained, which is itself weird.
Instead, much of The Pit is devoted to Jamie's bizarre discovery in the nearby forest's floor of a huge deep dark pit – an enormous hole down inside which four (previously five) flesh-eating troglodyte/troll monsters live. Jamie tries feeding them chocolate bars to make them his friends, throwing the bars into the pit, but when the trogs ignore them he buys them meat from the local butcher out of his small amount of savings, which is much more to their liking. But what happens when his savings run out, and his determined if dismal attempts to snatch a cow and catch some chickens all end in hysterical but abysmal failure? Why, ask Teddy for advice, of course, which Jamie duly does – and Teddy helpfully suggests that Jamie should feed to the trogs all of the people who have been mean to him!
So that is precisely what Jamie does – luring,
leading, or in one case lugging the victim along in her own wheelchair through the
forest till they reach the pit and fall into it. And here's another strange thing – the pit is ginormous, yet no-one ever seems to notice it until it's too late.
Eventually the local cops realise that the populace is rapidly diminishing, and
when Jamie ties one end of a thick rope to some trees and throws the other end
of it down into the pit so that the trogs can escape and find their own food,
things swiftly become very messy indeed.
The Pit is a truly oddball, offbeat movie that is billed as a horror flick. Yet apart from the accidental but grisly fate that befalls poor Sandy (with 'fall' being the operative word!) and a few very brief gory moments towards the end, it's played much more as black comedy than anything else (not counting the highly uncomfortable voyeur scenes early on in the movie). Even its accompanying music sounds as if it has been lifted from a Carry-On film at times, especially in the scenes where Jamie is bringing his victims to the pit, during which the background music veers dangerously towards 'Yackety Sax', the well known piece of music that always accompanied the inevitable chase scene at the end of every episode of The Benny Hill Show back in the day. Added to all of this is a series of delightfully dry quips delivered straight to camera in totally deadpan manner by Snyders as Jamie.
Speaking of whom: I won't reveal how The Pit ends other than to say that
Jamie gets his just deserts in the most fitting if unexpected of ways. Oh, and did I mention that after Sandy's dreadful albeit unintended demise, a devastated Jamie keeps seeing her as a ghostly blood-drenched apparition who sternly admonishes him when he tells lies in order to draw the scent away from him when the police come calling and starting asking awkward questions about her unexplained disappaearance?
Quite frankly, I am totally unsure what to make of The Pit, as it seems to have sampled and sewn together into a veritable cinematic patchwork quilt all manner of influences and themes from an array of very different movie genres. I've read an interview with this film's writer, Ian A. Stuart (click here), who seemingly had in mind a very different storyline for it, in which all of the weird stuff, including the trogs, were intended to be imaginary, just figments inside Jamie's twisted mind, but apparently Stuart was over-ruled, and the trogs were incorporated as real entities instead.
The Pit is very much a make-of-it-what-you-will movie, and also very much a Marmite movie (you'll either love it or hate it) – that's for sure!
Incidentally, while watching Sammy Snyders playing Jamie, I was somewhat distracted for a while, because I knew that I'd seen him somewhere before – he had a very distinctive face when young – but I just couldn't place where. Then suddenly, about half way through the movie, the very tuneful theme song from the 1979 TV show Huckleberry Finn and His Friends abruptly popped into my head (click here to access it), a show that I'd watched from time to time when first screened. And then it hit me – Snyders was the actor who had played the young Tom Sawyer in it! So now you know!
If you'd like to watch an official trailer for The Pit aka Teddy to see what you make of this Canadian curiosity, please click here. Or why not go one better and do what I did? Click here to view the entire movie while it's available to watch for free on YouTube.
And to view a complete listing of all of my
Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly
accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!
Such a wonderfully weird, but effective, little regional. The Blu Ray is a must have.
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