Many films feature a character who has an imaginary friend, but whereas such friends are usually invisible to everyone else, in the Canadian psychological thriller/horror movie to be reviewed here the imaginary friend is visible – only too visible, and audible, in fact!
For me, the most effective horror movies are not the ones awash with blood and gore, but rather those that get inside your head, insidiously penetrating your mind, infiltrating and then tenaciously taking residence within your thoughts, your dreams, and sometimes your nightmares too. Last night, I watched one such movie – Pin.
Directed and written by Sandor Stern, based upon Andrew Neiderman's eponymous 1981 novel, and released by New World Pictures in 1988, Pin (or PIN, as given in some sources, despite this name not being an acronym) takes to a whole new level of creepiness the perennially popular horror theme of an inanimate human simulacrum ostensibly taking on a life of its own, and a malign, controlling one at that, whether it be a ventriloquist's dummy (as in Magic, 1978, for instance), a life-sized doll (as more recently in The Boy, 2016), or something else.
In the case of Pin, the 'something else' is a life-sized anatomically-precise adult male wood/plastic medical dummy named Pin (short for Pinocchio, a name given to it by the then-young daughter of physician Dr Frank Linden (played by Terry O'Quinn), sitting in a wheelchair.
SPOILER ALERT!! I do not normally present the entire storyline of a movie when reviewing it, but in this instance I feel it necessary to do so – so if you don't want to know the plot and in particular its final, devastating twist, read no further!!
In a very strange, unconventional family set-up, both Dr Linden and his wife Mrs Linden (Bronwen Mantel) are very cold and distant to their two children, Ursula (Cynthia Preston when Ursula reaches her teens) and her slightly older brother Leon (David Hewlett when Leon reaches his teens). Mrs Linden, moreover, is driven to manic levels by cleaning OCD, to such an extent that she refuses to allow the children to bring any potential school friends home in case they make the house dirty. So away from school Leon and Ursula remain isolated from children their own age, relying very much on each other for friendship, but in the case of Leon, he has one very special additional friend too…
Dr Linden uses Pin not only to demonstrate biology to adult patients and as a demonstration aid at medical conventions but also as a means of relaxing young patients, by using his considerable ventriloquism skills in order to enable Pin to 'talk' to them, explaining their ailments in a child-friendly manner. He even uses Pin as a surrogate to talk to Ursula and Leon when they are small (communicating with them via the dummy in a playful way that he is emotionally incapable of doing directly, as their father). Yet whereas as they grow older Ursula realizes that Pin's talking is merely ventriloquism, performed by their father, Leon continues to believe that Pin is genuinely talking to him – a first indication that Leon may have issues…
And indeed, as the years go by from childhood into adolescence Leon turns ever more to Pin, treating him as a fully-fledged friend, mastering ventriloquism until he is as adept at this cryptic art as his father is, and using it to have long conversations with Pin whenever he finds himself alone with the dummy in his father's surgery. Disturbingly, however, Leon still believes that Pin is talking to him, seemingly unaware that it is he himself, via ventriloquism, who is providing Pin with its voice (a somewhat eerie voice, incidentally, supplied by Wiseguy actor Jonathan Banks).
By the time that Leon and Ursula have reached their teens, Leon's mind has to all intents and purposes split into two autonomous portions, each with its own personality. One portion is Leon, the other portion is Pin, but no-one in his family is aware of his psychosis, until Ursula, now aged 15 and sexually promiscuous, discovers that she is pregnant. Petrified about telling her father, she confesses all to Leon, asking his advice. In reply, and to her bewilderment, Leon proposes that they go and ask Pin, and when he takes her to the dummy she watches incredulously as Leon and Pin have a conversation about her situation. She can see straight away that Leon is using ventriloquism to yield Pin's voice, just like her father did when they were children, but she can also see that Leon is not aware of what he is doing, that instead he truly believes Pin is talking to him. Traumatised, she flees the room.
Ursula has no option but to confess her pregnancy to their father, who decides to carry out the required abortion himself, and even encourages Leon to watch, for educational purposes! Speaking of which: years earlier when explaining the facts of life to Ursula and Leon after their mother had caught them giggling over a pornographic magazine, instead of telling them directly he had yet again used Pin to do so, even allowing them to check out Pin's private parts. I told you that they were a strange family! It's little wonder that Leon went off the rails, but it took their father a long time to realize just how far off the rails Leon had travelled.
One evening, however, after returning unexpectedly to his surgery to pick up some papers that he'd forgotten for a lecture that he is due to give shortly at a medical society and is already running late for, Linden is greatly shocked to discover a now late-teenage Leon there, having one of his ventriloquistic conversations with Pin. Linden realizes for the very first time that his son is mentally ill, and that his own ventriloquistic use of Pin with Leon and Ursula as children is at the core of his illness.
Deciding not to confront Leon about this for the time being, yet determined to sever the unhealthy link between Leon and Pin with all speed, Linden simply tells him to go home, but not to let his mother sitting in their car outside see him. Then as soon as Leon is gone, Linden carries Pin to the car, where he tells his wife that he will be permanently leaving the dummy at the medical society for use in teaching purposes. However, he doesn't realize that Leon has been hiding nearby, has seen and heard everything, and is totally distraught at the thought of losing Pin, his only friend other than Ursula.
Driving erratically at high speed in an attempt to make up time and not to be too late for the faculty meeting, Linden loses control of the car when Pin in the back seat topples forward onto him, causing the car to crash. Linden and his wife are both killed, but when the police inform Leon and Ursula, Leon retrieves Pin from the wrecked car and brings the dummy back home.
Leon and Ursula now have their grand family house entirely to themselves, and can live how they choose – except, that is, for a brief period when their bossy Aunt Dorothy (Patricia Collins) arrives to take charge of them and the house, which she has always coveted. Like I say, however, Dorothy's stay is brief, thanks to Leon using Pin to quite literally frighten her to death one evening, after having drugged an unsuspecting Ursula to ensure that she sleeps through it all.
Taking a local job as a librarian to get away from the claustrophobic and downright deranged atmosphere with Leon at home, who has now taken to dressing Pin in their late father's clothes, applying latex to his plastic face to make him look more human, and even insisting that he join them at the table for meals, Ursula gains a boyfriend in the shape of college athlete Stan Fraker (John Pyper-Ferguson). Jealous, Leon tries to have relationships with women, who are sexually attracted to him because of his slim handsome looks, but he has no sexual interest in them whatsoever, and even uses Pin to scare away one persistent would-be lover, Marcia. The only woman of his own age whom he considers to be beautiful is Ursula – uh-oh…
Both Ursula's job and (especially) her boyfriend anger Leon, who feels that Ursula, who has always looked up to him, is beginning to slip out of his grasp. So. as always, Leon confides his fears to Pin, who agrees with him, which only increases his paranoia, in every sense. Consequently, being well aware of Leon's antagonism towards her job and boyfriend, one day Ursula invites Stan back to the house for a meal and for him to become better acquainted with Leon, in the hope that Leon will come to like him – but as soon as Stan arrives, holding a box of chocolates for Ursula, Leon takes the chocolates from him, telling him that Pin loves chocolates, and insists upon introducing him to Pin. To Leon's surprise and displeasure, however, Stan seems unfazed by the dummy, even talking to it (because Ursula had forewarned Stan about the Leon/Pin situation). During the evening, Leon becomes increasingly distraught and distracted by how close Ursula and Stan clearly are, but when they ask him to read some of his poetry to them, writing poetry having long been his greatest intellectual passion, Leon begins to unwind, especially when Stan appears to like it.
Delighted by this unexpected turn of events, Leon goes joyfully upstairs to tell Pin, but Pin warns him not to be fooled. Sure enough, when Leon comes back down he overhears Stan and Ursula talking animatedly, with Ursula stating that she is only too well aware of Leon's mental state, having read every book on paranoid schizophrenia and suchlike in the library, but she will not allow him to be incarcerated in a mental asylum. In response, Stan retorts that even Leon's poetry is sick – and indeed, in the poem that he had read to them a little earlier that evening, its protagonist was seeking to rape his own sister. There had been indications of incestuous thoughts on Leon's part all through the movie but this is the first time that they are made readily apparent.
Leon does not betray that he knows what Ursula and Stan have said, but, goaded on by Pin, he swiftly plans his revenge, luring Stan shortly afterwards to visit him at the house while Ursula is at work in the library, on the pretext of needing Stan's help in arranging a surprise birthday party for her. After drugging Stan's drink when he arrives to render him sleepy, Leon savagely beats Stan about the head with a heavy ornament, then places his body inside a transparent zip-up suit bag before hiding it in the woodpile outside, beneath a big pile of logs. He then tries to scrub the blood off the floor inside the house where Stan had fallen – all the while following Pin's specific instructions.
When Ursula returns home that evening, however, it is clear from Leon's flustered attitude and inability to eat that all is not well, and she too is worried, not having received a call from Stan about their planned night out together. Leon tries to cover by claiming that Stan had called him instead, asking him to tell Ursula that he had to visit a sick relative, but Ursula is clearly not convinced. Suddenly, she hears a very familiar, characteristic chiming – the chime that is emitted on the hour every hour by the watch that she had recently given Stan as a birthday present.
At first, Ursula thinks that Stan is playing a joke on her, that he is hiding here inside the house. Then she finds his watch on the floor, and spots a wet patch of blood on the carpet close by. When she confronts Leon, he breaks down, falling to the ground alongside Pin sitting in its wheelchair, and putting the blame on Pin, claiming that it was all the dummy's fault. Hysterical with rage, Ursula races outside, grabs a heavy double-axe from the woodpile, races back inside, swings it over her head, then brings it crashing down as a terrified Leon screams out – and then...
The next thing that we see on screen is the police outside the Linden house, with Ursula held inside one of their cars, and a couple of police officers removing logs from the woodpile, watched by other officers and a crowd of curious onlookers. Suddenly, one of the two officers at the woodpile spots the bag containing Stan's body and then, as he begins to haul it out, he gasps in amazement – Stan is still alive!
Only one final, but unforgettable scene is left to play. At some undetermined time following the above-described climax, Ursula and a now fully-recovered Stan have driven back to the Linden family house. Leaving Stan outside in the car, Ursula goes inside, meets briefly with a nurse (who refers to her as Mrs Fraker, so she and Stan are clearly married now), then walks inside one of the upstairs rooms. A figure is sitting motionless in a wheelchair at the far end of the room, staring out of a window with their back towards her.
"Hello Pin," Ursula says, but receives no response from the figure. She then states that she and Stan are going away on vacation to Cape Cod for a week, and she wonders if there is anything that Pin would like. In its unmistakable voice, Pin tells her to wind up a musical ballerina figurine, which when she was a child had been given to her by her father as a gift from Pin. It now stands next to a framed photo-portrait of Leon on a table next to where she is standing inside the room, so she winds it up and watches it as it slowly rotates on its base while the tinkling music plays. "Have you heard from Leon?" asks Pin. Striving to hold back tears and remain composed, Ursula replies that she hasn't. "I miss him a great deal," responds Pin. This time, it takes longer for Ursula to compose herself, before finally replying: "So do I".
By now, I'd seriously begun to wonder whether this riveting if decidedly weird movie had cleverly thrown me a curved ball from the word go, i.e. that Pin had genuinely been talking all along, and that every assumption I'd made about what had been happening in the story had therefore been wrong, its plot having presented a masterly performance in misdirection, in fact – but then…
Throughout their brief conversation, the camera has remained focused entirely upon Ursula, mostly upon her face. Abruptly, however, the camera now switches instantaneously from Ursula's face to that of Pin – except, of course, it isn't Pin's face or, indeed, Pin. It is Leon – totally immobile, with his face as expressionless as Pin's had always been, but it is Leon's, and Leon, nonetheless. After several seconds, his face fades to black, and the end credits start to roll.
From this dramatic closing shot, it is now evident what had happened earlier after an enraged Ursula had brought down the axe. She hadn't attacked Leon with it (she'd be in prison if she had done, not going on holiday with Stan!). Instead, she had smashed up Pin, whom she blamed for Leon's madness and all the unhappiness that had stemmed from that for both of them. But seeing his friend destroyed had been too much for Leon's already fragile grasp on reality to withstand. Incapable of bearing the loss of Pin, Leon had become Pin. The Leon portion of his mind had been absorbed entirely by the Pin portion. Only the outer physical shell of Leon remained, his mind now was Pin, which is why Ursula had addressed him as Pin. No doubt she had been advised by Leon's medical team that this is the only way that she would elicit any response from an otherwise catatonic Leon. (Incidentally, this closing scene explains the otherwise oblique opening one that I deliberately haven't mentioned here, bringing this movie's plot full circle, but I'll leave you to watch the full film in order to understand that!)
Many movies of this nature would have taken the clichéd cop-out route when bringing it to a shocking close – revealing that Pin was alive after all, that he really had been some supernatural or possessed entity. So it was a pleasant surprise that this time the movie-makers had stuck to their guns and remained faithful to everything that they had set up along the way. In particular, when he is first seen making Pin talk, close-ups of Dr Linden's face plainly show the slight movements of his lips and throat, leaving the viewer in no doubt that ventriloquism is at work. The same ploy is used when Leon is talking to Pin about Ursula's pregnancy while she is present – she even looks directly at Leon's lips and throat, and later asks him when he had learnt to do that (to which Leon denies that he'd done anything, claiming that Pin had truly spoken to them – tragic testimony to the split-personality status that his mind had assumed by now).
But the fact that Pin is not supernatural does not make his story any less terrifying – if anything, it becomes even more so, when the full extent of Leon's psychosis becomes apparent. And here I have to give great praise to the two leads, whose acting skills achieve so much in maintaining both the interest and the believability of this often macabre but thoroughly spellbinding film that in lesser hands could so easily have been trite and tasteless. Moreover, even its musical score (by Peter Manning Robinson) is both despairingly sad and captivatingly creepy! But back to the leads:
David Hewlett is mesmerizingly chilling, creating in the superficially charming but socially awkward and increasingly unhinged Leon a serious rival to Anthony Perkins's duplicitously deadly, thoroughly insane Norman Bates in Psycho, no less. And yet, having seen the emotional torments inflicted upon him throughout his childhood and adolescence by his own unequivocally odd, unfeeling parents and cruel, uncaring schoolmates, one cannot help but feel sorry for Leon, and even a degree of compassion and comprehension too when in desperate need for a friend and confidante he turns from outward influences to inward ones instead, his troubled mind focusing upon Pin and insidiously transforming him into the perfect friend. Meanwhile, almost as if she is the obverse side of the same coin as Leon (which I suppose in many ways is indeed true), Cyndy Preston's Ursula is so outward going that by adolescence she has become sexually promiscuous. Nevertheless, she is also winsomely and winningly beautiful, both physically and personally, remaining believably steadfast to her disturbed brother throughout the movie, even to – especially to – the very end, despite her terrible realization quite early on that his mind is seriously damaged.
Pin was released at a time when the horror movie fad was for supernatural shocks and scares, all garnished with lashings of gore and gallons of blood, so this sophisticated horror movie of the mind pretty much lost its way, receiving praise from those few who actually noticed it, but overlooked by the vast majority of viewers and reviewers. This is a great tragedy, because it deserved, and still deserves, far more recognition. Today, like so many other distinctive films that suffered similarly unjust fates when originally released, Pin has become something of a cult movie, and rightly so. Alfred Hitchcock, who directed the afore-mentioned Psycho, was a great believer in less is more when producing a successful thriller film, and in leaving its most shocking content to the human imagination, so I strongly suspect that he would have enjoyed Pin, which follows his example to the letter.
I freely confess that despite being a lover of strange, little-known movies, I was entirely unaware of Pin until I chanced upon a DVD of it for 50p on a market stall just over a week ago, but it was 50p very well spent, that's for sure! Moreover, you can enjoy Pin for even less than that, because if you click here, you can currently watch this entire movie free of charge, on YouTube (or here, if you want to watch a hilariously OTT trailer for it!). You can thank me later!
Finally: To view a complete chronological 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, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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