Monday, October 8, 2018

October Horror Challenge 2018 #24: "The Dead Pit"



This is a movie I've wanted to watch ever since I used to see the movie cover in video stores back when I was a kid. The cover I remember looked more like this:


The creepy zombie doctor crawling out of the pit looked awesome to me. It still does, really.  Gotta love creepy evil doctors.

This movie is about a doctor doing sick experiments in his patients in a mental hospital. Once his evil deeds are discovered, he's thrown into the basement with his mutilated creatures and walled up in the basement (standard procedure in the 60s?) Twenty years later, a patient is admitted to the hospital with amnesia,  and she seems to have a psychic connection to the patients who were walled into the basement, but everyone thinks she's crazy, so no one believes her, even after patients start acting inexplicably violent and nurses and orderlies start disappearing.

The premise is ridiculous, of course. How could a doctor and a bunch of patients just disappear without anyone realizing something is wrong? Why does no one remember it and how is the hospital still open? And how is the doctor who killed all these people and sealed the doctor up in the basement still working for the hospital and no one suspects anything? And why is Jane Doe allowed to wander around the hospital in her underwear? Doesn't she get cold?

While the plot may not be believable,  the acting isn't bad. I liked Jane Doe and the other patient she befriends who helps her investigate.  The evil doctor zombie is creepy looking too. The doctor who caused all this is a big jerk, so I was rooting for him to get killed horribly at some point, which kept me interested in the movie. I also wanted to find out what connection Jane Doe had with the evil doctor, so the movie kept my attention. The gore isn't over the top, but it doesn't look fake, which is a plus, and there's enough suspense and plot twists to keep me guessing. Overall I was happy with this one and glad I finally watched it.

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