Stuart Gordon's 1991 Adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum is Good Dirty Fun and a Terrific Showcase for Star Lance Henrickson
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In addition to directing the legendary Poe cycle, Roger Corman famously mentored an incredible galaxy of future filmmaking greats, from Joe Dante to James Cameron to John Sayles to Peter Bogdanovich.
These future titans of the silver screen paid their dues cranking out wildly over-achieving exploitation movies overflowing with sex, sleaze, nudity, violence and, sometimes, social commentary.
Charles Band, of Empire and then Full Moon infamy, basically has Stuart Gordon. Gordon was the resident genius of Band’s Empire and Full Moon but he was nevertheless expected to deliver the exploitation movie goods when it came to nudity, gore, sex, violence and sexual violence.
Gordon was an artist and a visionary but also a man who needed to make a living. So he managed to infect exceedingly commercial genre movies with his unmistakable stamp, at once gleefully gory and delightfully demented.
Gordon’s gruesome 1991 shocker Pit and the Pendulum follows in the footsteps of Corman’s 1961 adaptation in fleshing out the bare bones of Edgar Allen Poe’s iconic short story into a darkly comic feature film.
A feature length adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum would, by definition take liberties with the original text, because there’s just not enough in it for a 90 minute movie. Since The Pit and the Pendulum is a Full Moon production, fleshing out Poe’s terse terror tale involves the addition of a lot of naked flesh and a lot of flesh being tortured in a series of colorful, gruesome ways.
The Pit and the Pendulum deviates from Poe’s original story in other crucial ways as well. Gordon turned Poe’s story about man’s inhumanity to man and the murderous hypocrisy of religious zealots into a love story about a bond so pure that it survives even the infinite darkness of the Spanish Inquisition.
Because this is a Stuart Gordon film, the theatrical showman turned cinematic fright master has an awful lot of fun pushing the inhuman brutality of the Spanish Inquisition to comic extremes.
The Pit and the Pendulum is the darkest of dark comedies. It opens by exposing the violent lunacy behind religious extremism in general and The Spanish Inquisition by having its team of blood-thirsty inquisitors, led by Grand Inquisitor Torquemada (a perfectly cast Lance Henricksen, oozing sinister authority and pummeling intensity) torture and punish sinners despite the guilty already being dead for a very long time.
Torquemada sees himself as the pitiless avenger of a cruel and vindictive Old Testament God with no use for love or mercy, only punishment and pain. He’s a sick fuck whose idea of serving God looks an awful lot like doing the devil’s handiwork.
He’s a sadomasochistic sick fuck who gets off on being flogged and flogging himself when not doling out pain to poor wenches erroneously accused of practicing witchcraft and other dark arts.
When idealistic peasant Maria (Rona De Ricci) speaks out against the church’s widespread use of torture to extract confessions of witchcraft and also just for the fun of it, Torquemada is enraged but also titillated.
He finds himself sexually attracted to the pure-hearted beauty and her nubile flesh so he decides to punish himself for his impure thoughts and Maria for inflaming his sleeping libido.
Torquemada can’t help but leer at Maria’s naked, vulnerable flesh but looking isn’t enough and he promises to save Maria’s devoted husband Antonio (Jonathan Fuller) from certain death if she has sex with him.
The multiple scenes of our heroine’s unclothed body being ogled and groped by evil men masquerading as instruments of God’s will add to the film’s grim fatalism and its vision of the world as lurid, depraved and unspeakably cruel.
But they also feel like seedy, sordid exploitation, the kind that made Full Moon a force on the home video market if not a perennial awards contender. They reminded me a little of a Full Moon production called Meridian: Kiss of the Beast, which starred Sherilyn Fenn at the height of her ethereal sexiness and played a big role in my development for reasons that have nothing to do with its negligible quality.
Gordon was a preeminent auteur of exploitation but he also made movies that elevated exploitation to art.
In the castle where most of the film takes place Mariana befriends an old woman who actually is a witch but in this harsh realm witches are forces for good while the Catholic Church is a force for pure evil.
This, friends, is what is known as historical realism. It takes The Pit and the Pendulum a VERY long time to actually get to the titular pendulum. This time it’s Antonio, our heroine’s faithful husband, who ends up within slicing distance of the old school torture instrument, with Torquemada swinging the blade.
The Pit and the Pendulum benefits tremendously from a killer cast led by one of the only actors alive arguably creepier than Jeffrey Combs, who was De Niro to Gordon’s ghoulish Scorsese.
It similarly benefits from the presence of Combs himself as part of Torquemada’s crew of inquisitors. Combs adds his usual oddball energy to the scene-stealing role of a man who is evil even by the exceedingly lenient standards of inquisitors.
It’s the titular pit! And the titular pendulum!
Combs is not the only ringer in a ridiculously over-stuffed cast. Oliver Reed meets a dramatic end as a Cardinal who makes the mistake of telling Torquemada that the Church will no longer condone or aggressively promote torture to achieve its ends.
That’s just about the worst news he can imagine and lashes out accordingly. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer sidekick Tom Towles and Breaking Bad’s Mark Margolis round out a supporting cast populated by an impressive array of tough guy character actors.
The Pit and the Pendulum is grim even by Gordon standards yet it boasts a happy ending that’s surprising because while the film features the violent ends of many, many lives, generally of the innocent, it also seems to inhabit a world devoid of happiness, just pain.
As with Robot Jox and Dolls, Gordon’s last two films, The Pit and the Pendulum could use a much bigger budget but the filmmaker makes magic happen without much in the way of resources beyond a terrific cast and a darkly funny script.
The Pit and the Pendulum may be minor Gordon but its full of major morbid pleasures.
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