The Pit and the Pendulum
by Roger Corman
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DVD details
Actor: Antony Carbone, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, Luana Anders, Vincent PriceDirector: Roger Corman
Cinematographer: Floyd Crosby
Editor: Anthony Carras
Producer: Samuel Z. Arkoff
Producer: James H. Nicholson
Writer: Richard Matheson
Writer: Edgar Allan Poe
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 80 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-06-05
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: American International Pictures (AIP)
DVD Reviews of The Pit and the Pendulum
DVD Review: Am I not the spawn of depraved blood?
Summary: 5 Stars
True!--nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous
I had been and am;
but why will you say that I am mad?
Deeper, deeper
the pit holds secrets
preserved for the wretched
and silent of heart
The price is steep
the steel is all but borrowed
Torture, oh the torture
so close, so hollow
I foamed--I raved--I swore!
They make them like this
never, oh never
nevermore
DVD Review: Great
Summary: 5 Stars
Great experience with this group. Quick response and turn around. Excellent Job!DVD Review: The Pit and the Pendulum Not Satisfying!
Summary: 3 Stars
My opinion on "The Pit and the Pendulum" is not very satisfying. I liked the storyline, but not the way the director expressed it. It was very unthoughtful. The director should have put the story into other people's perspectives. For instance, the director could have made some of the flashback scenes black and white, instead of blue. The torture chamber could have been a bit more gruesome instead of "lolly fairy-land!"
The story begins with Elizabeth. As the story goes on, we experience the hysteria of Elizabeth's death. And as the story ends, we find that Elizabeth did what she did for love.
This movie is best for audiences ages twelve and older. Younger audiences would be frightened and wouldn't understand why things would go as they go.
As I watched on, I came to find out that Vincent Price played Nicholas, husband of Elizabeth and a mental patient! He was rated 2 1/2 stars for his performance. I feel he could have used more facial expressions and he could have used more action to show his relation to the character.
According to the overall storyline, I can honestly say it was very unpredictable. One event would happen, it would lead to the next, then BOOM! - something totally unexpected would happen!
The angles at which the movie was shot was very straight-forward. I feel that the camera men could have used more precise angles and could have "captured the moment" more clearly. The special effects manager could have used more effects and could have made the flashback moments clearer, not with a blue undertone.
The music in this film was very old - more classical than twenty-first century. Improvements I would have made are to make the flashbacks more visible and use language that younger people could understand. But Edgar Allan Poe wrote this very nicely, as he grabs the readers' attention and builds suspense.
DVD Review: HOUSE OF USHER 2
Summary: 4 Stars
Success breeds excess, so following HOUSE OF USHER, AIP asked Roger Corman for a follow-up. Some films you CAN'T do sequels to... but this never seems to stop anybody. Now, while USHER and PIT have nothing to do with each other, if one were to, say, watch them back-to-back, based on the many story elements they DO have in common, one might mistake the 2nd film's title for HOUSE OF USHER 2 !!!
Both films have the identical opening. A man who's traveled far has trouble getting into a big mansion, and inquires about a woman. In the original, it was a guy wanting to see his fiance, and her brother-- who's going mad-- refuses, claiming it's for the best. In this one, the guy inquires after his DEAD sister-- and her husband-- Price-- greets him warmly, but as things progress, his sanity slips away.
The 1st was elegant in its simplicity. The 2nd, an "original" story (heh) is more "the kitchen sink" category. I mean, what a GREAT flick. This thing tries to hit ALL the bases. Spooky castle-- dead woman-- crypt in the basement-- TORTURE CHAMBER in the basement. There's a story about how Price's late wife became obsessed with the torture chamber, accidentally got locked in and died of fright. Ther's another story about how as a boy, Price saw his father (an infamous member of The Inquisition) accuse HIS wife & brother of adultery, and after killing his brother, had tortured his wife TO DEATH (some house, huh?). And then people start hearing harpsichord music in the night-- when it was the dead wife who played it all the time. There's even a secret passageway in the walls. It just keeps stacking up higher and higher as it goes.
It's not often a really good film that becomes successful spawns an equally good follow-up. I'd say this was one of 'em.
This film has something in common with the 007 film, OCTOPUSSY. Both are not really adaptations of the stories they take their names from-- but, in effect, SEQUELS to them.
Among the cast was Price's sister-- played by (I took note) Luana Anders. I had to look it up, but she'd also been in the memorable OUTER LIMITS episode-- "The Guests". Geez!!! One of the really FREAKIN' WEIRD ones!!! That's the one about the house inhabited by an alien from space, where time stands still and nobody ever ages... UNLESS they leave, and then time catches up, all at once. I'd have to look it up, but I'd BET that sicko Joe Stefano wrote that one. He did most of the REALLY whacked-out one the 1st year (he was one of the show's 3 exec. producers).
Anyway... Unlike USHER, in PIT Price starts out on the friendly-- but shaky-- side. Then he degenerates into sad & depressed... UNTIL... that scene in the dungeon when they GO TOO FAR. As far as a "#2" film goes, PIT has this in common with PSYCHO II. Wonder if the writers of THAT film thought about this one when they came up with their plot? You have this whole mystery of "What's going on?" and only near the end of the film do you find out, several people have been scheming to drive the poor lead character out of his mind. AND THEY SUCCEED-- all too well! When Price starts smiling down in the dungeon, I found myself saying aloud, "UH OH!!!" several times. And laughing.
For most of the film, it kept bugging me that the doctor and the brother looked so much alike. It's not good to cast 2 actors in the same film who resemble each other. But when the doctor SLIPPED and fell into the pit, suddenly this seeming liability became part of the plot (at least for me), as Price in his madness mistook the brother for the doctor-- and strapped him down on the platform! AAAUGH!!!
And of course, wasn't it just too bad that the brother-- and Price's sister-- NEVER realized that Elisabeth WAS still alive-- and trapped in the dungeon? "No one will ever enter this room again." That was exactly the line Price said earlier in the film...! Nasty, nasty!!
I'd rank this along with RED DEATH and LIGEIA among the top 3 of the series.
DVD Review: "The shrieking of the mutilated victims became the music of his life."
Summary: 4 Stars
Pit and the Pendulum (1961) was the 2nd of numerous successful Edgar Allan Poe inspired collaborations (the first being 1960's The Fall of the House of Usher) between writer/producer/director Roger Corman (It Conquered the World, Teenage Cave Man, The Little Shop of Horrors), writer Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man, House of Usher, Tales of Terror), actor Vincent Price (House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler), and American International Pictures or AIP, for short. Also appearing here along with Price is Barbara Steele (Black Sunday, Castle of Blood), John Kerr (Tea and Sympathy, South Pacific), Luana Anders (Easy Rider, The Last Detail), and Antony Carbone (A Bucket of Blood, Last Woman on Earth).
The movie, set in 16th century Spain, begins as we see a man riding in a carriage along a coast approaching a matte painting of an ominous castle. The driver, unwilling to go all the way (isn't that always the case?), drops the man off a good distance from the matte painting...er, I mean castle, where he then has to hoof it the rest of the way. Turns out the man is named Francis Barnard (Kerr), and he's come all the way from England to inquire about the untimely demise of his sister, Elizabeth (Steele). Seems she married one Nicholas Medina (Price), moved into his castle, and then passed away under mysterious circumstances. As Francis arrives at the castle, he meets Nicholas' sister Catherine (Anders), who's returned home to look after the welfare of her brother (apparently Nicholas doted on his wife, and is taking her loss particularly hard). Soon Doctor Charles Leon (Carbone) makes the scene, and Francis learns his sister contracted some strange ailment Nicholas believes came from the `atmospheric miasma of barbarity that permeates the walls of the castle'...you see, Nicholas' father Sebastian was an inquisitor of grand proportions, so much so he had his own, private and extensive torture chamber set up within the caverns beneath the castle which saw a whole lot of action back in the day. After some flashbacks we learn of a couple incidents that occurred during Nicholas' childhood, incidents that have affected him in such a way as to make him a little unbalanced, a situation that isn't helped by the fact that the spirit of his dead wife is now haunting him. Things get a whole lot creepier as Nicholas decides to exhume his wife's corpse (seems she's interred in the crypts below the castle) after which some revelations are made, marking the real decent into madness as the comeuppance is dished out to all deserving, and even to some who aren't...I got to say, the last fifteen minutes alone is worth the price of admission, and that's one hell of a pendulum...
I've always felt The Fall of the House of Usher and Pit and the Pendulum to be among strongest and most accessible of the Poe based Corman films. Price gives an excellent turn as Nicholas, a character plagued by his father's past transgressions, driven to the brink of madness by circumstances beyond his control. Of all the aspects Price brings to these films, the one element that always seems to stand out for me is a sense of class. Price is the star here, and it seemed the rest were very content to follow his capable lead. My favorite bits in this film are when Price, in a dual role, is portraying Sebastian Medina, the inquisitor extraordinaire. He's a loathsome, vindictive character and a hell of a lot of fun to watch. The inclusion of Ms. Steele, who had just come from appearing in Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960), was a bit of inspirational casting, in my opinion, as while her part may not have been large, it certainly was memorable. Few could pull off some of the facial expressions she was capable of, some of them quite frightening (I would have dreaded getting one of her wild-eyed, maniacal stares in the middle of the night). I thought Anders and Carbone did well enough in their roles, but I felt Kerr was slightly miscast. He's certainly a decent actor, but I never felt like he got completely into his role as some of the others...perhaps this an unfair judgment on my part as I think it would be difficult to compete against the likes of a Price or a Steele...ah well, this is was a fairly minor aspect compared to the whole. As far as Richard Matheson's screenplay, it comes off exceptionally well. Even if you're not familiar with the story, I think it's fairly obvious where things are going, but that didn't take anything away for me as the fun here was watching the events unfold. I thought the overall atmosphere of the production, assisted by Les Baxter's ookie musical scoring, went a long way, although I thought the use of the fake cobwebs a bit excessive at times. The usage of various matte paintings was obvious, but they were done well enough as not to take anything away for me. Normally I dislike the inclusion of flashbacks, but I thought they were handled well here as various hues were incorporated dependant on the mood of the flashback (a violent flashback would feature a blood red hue, etc.). I thought Corman's direction quite good but then it's no secret his affinity for the material. The film may seem a little slow going in the beginning, but I didn't mind at all as it allowed for Price to display his talents, and provided for an exceptional build up (as I said earlier, the last fifteen minutes or so are definitely worth hanging around for...). All in all this is an excellent feature, one that I think manages to capture a good deal of the mood within the original material, and just a heck of a lot of fun to watch.
The picture, presented in non-anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) looks clean and comes across well, while the Dolby Digital mono audio, available in both English and French, felt a bit off at times, coming across a little uneven at times. Special features include a goofy original five-minute prologue segment, which I believe was used to help pad out the running time for television broadcast, an original theatrical trailer (in widescreen no less), a commentary track with Roger Corman, and French and Spanish subtitles. While this film was originally released onto DVD by itself, it was re-released later onto DVD as a double feature with The Fall of the House of Usher, so if you're interesting in purchasing this film, I'd recommend searching out the double feature as you may get a better value.
Cookieman108
Description of The Pit and the Pendulum
The Fall of the House of Usher's success in 1960 spurred American International Pictures to quickly launch another production based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. While producer-director Roger Corman had hoped to next adapt "The Masque of the Red Death" (which wasn't produced until 1964), Pit and the Pendulum (the onscreen title) became the second in AIP's long-running Poe series. Set in post-Inquisition Spain, the film stars John Kerr as a young Englishman who travels to the seaside castle of his brother-in-law (Vincent Price) to uncover the circumstances behind the death of his sister (a dubbed Barbara Steele). Price is tormented by memories of his mother's premature burial by his inquisitor father (also Price) and fears that this sadistic legacy has contributed to Steele's demise. Furthermore, he believes that Steele was also buried alive--a belief compounded by the mysterious destruction of her room, and the sound of her harpsichord playing in the night...Structured almost identically to Usher, Richard Matheson's script fleshes out the brief original text with a fast-paced and twist-filled plot that never loses sight of the psychological themes of Poe's work. It also provides Price with the richest of his many AIP/Poe roles, a sympathetic, deeply emotional man who is unhinged by the sins of his father. Corman's direction is equally driven and fluid, and features some impressive quasi-psychedelic visuals in the tense climax. Also noteworthy is art director's Daniel Haller's impressive design of the title set piece. MGM's widescreen DVD features commentary by Corman, which focuses primarily on the film's technical aspects. Also included is the original trailer and a prologue (shot by Norma Rae producer Tamara Asseyev) featuring costar Luana Anders, which was added to fill out the film's 1968 television broadcast. --Paul Gaita
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