Nifty title here, huh? I figure it can't possibly be any worse than the last movie I watched. Plus, while this movie sounds sleazy as hell, it actually has more literary street cred than might first appear. It's a 1967 movie starring horror legend Christopher Lee, and it's based on the story "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allen Poe. Very very very loosly based maybe, but still.
I've never seen this movie before now, though I've heard of it before. It's one of the lesser known Poe adaptations, but so was "The Oblong Box," which I watched last year, and I really liked that one. This one is decidedly lower rent than that one though, with really terrible dubbing that distracted me right from the start. The premise sounds ok: a diabolical man captures, tortures, and murders twelve virgins in his underground chamber. An intended thirteenth victim escapes and leads authorities back to the evil doctor, who is drawn and quartered by horses for his crimes.
The evil doctor swears to get revenge from beyond the grave, and years later, it seems he is doing just that. A man played by Lex Barker returns to the castle, about forty years after the killer was executed, hoping to find out more about his past. He meets a young barroness on the way who hitches a ride with him. Soon they discover that the mad doctor's assistant wants to bring him back from the dead to continue his killing spree and gain immortality. Bummer.
Besides the bad dubbing, the acting isn't all that great here. It seems like everyone involved is just cashing a paycheck here. It's fun seeing a guy get ripped into four pieces at the beginning, though. Plus a later scene where our protagonists are traveling by horse drawn carriage through a forrest filled with rotting corpses tied to the trees is really creepy. I think I would have enjoyed this movie more when I was a kid. It just seems silly to me now, and not in a fun way. I'm not a fan.
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