Written by: Jase Marsiglia
Filmmaker Charles Band is nothing if not ambitious. From the early '80s, Band's Empire International Pictures had a way of making low-budget B movies look larger and more expensive than they really were. Tightly knit, and featuring a stable of talent that included the likes of Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Tim Thomerson, Michael Moriarty, Mary Woronov, Adrienne Barbeau, Linnea Quigley, and Malcolm McDowell, as well as a murderer's row of talented, eager writers and directors that included Stuart Gordon, David DeCoteau, Dennis Paoli, and Scott Spiegel, along with a crackerjack team of hard working special effects artists led by John Carl Buechler's company, MMI (Mechanical and Makeup Imageries), Empire Pictures cranked out low budget, high concept pictures that brought monsters and mayhem to theaters and always felt like more than the sum of their parts. Owning a castle and studio in the Lazio region of Rome, Italy, didn't hurt the production value either.
But the cost and overhead of these productions led to downsizing and, eventually, in 1988, collapse and bankruptcy. The "salad days" had come to an end, and Band needed to regroup, rebrand, and move forward somehow. With the same idea in mind, albeit scaled back considerably, Band created Full Moon Pictures in late 1988 as a new production house for horror and science fiction films that held onto the spirit of Empire, but on a more cost effective level, distributing their films to VHS through Paramount Pictures and Pioneer Home Entertainment, both of whom were major studios.
When one goes back to the early '90s, perusing the horror aisles for weekend movies, the iconic Full Moon Entertainment logo of a blue moon partially covered by black clouds always stood out. Its flagship franchises, Puppet Master and Subspecies, were both heavily marketed and contained brief behind the scenes features titled VideoZone at the end of the films. They would become "the norm" and were appreciated by fans of Empire Pictures' past. Regardless of your feelings toward Full Moon's output today, with films like Gingerdead Man, Killjoy, and Evil Bong becoming the new "icons" alongside the more creative fare of Toulon's trunk of puppets or Romanian vampire Radu Vladislas, no film better exemplifies the heyday of Empire Pictures under this new banner than 1991's The Pit and the Pendulum.
The Pit and the Pendulum (1991)
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Italy stands in for 1492 Spain in this adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, with Lance Henriksen playing the sadistic Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, apprehending Maria (the beautiful Rona De Ricci), the wife of a poor baker named Antonio (Jonathan Fuller), and subjecting her to torture and cruelty under the accusation of witchcraft. But Maria is no witch and, like so many during the Inquisition, is simply an innocent woman whose beauty has "bewitched" the psychotic Torquemada, who uses her torture to repress his own sexual urges. She finds comfort from an unlikely ally, an actual witch confined to the dungeon named Esmeralda (Frances Bay, Happy Gilmore's grandma), who gives Maria a few tips and tricks to keep herself mentally and spiritually stable during her duress. But the evil monk's perverse obsession with her grows worse and more violent by the day. Will Maria survive long enough for her husband Antonio to infiltrate the castle and save her from Torquemada's newest device, the bladed pendulum?
The duo behind Re Animator and From Beyond, director Stuart Gordon and writer Dennis Paoli, tackle Poe's work with their usual (and expected) gusto for gore and nudity, much as they did with Lovecraft's stories, with the simple tale being positioned during a medieval era of heresy and horror. An age that lends itself perfectly to sexual depravity and unimaginable torture. Henriksen is gruff and mean, playing full tilt into the madness of his barbarous character, allegedly staying deep in character off camera and causing a bit of a stir in Italy with his behavior as well. In this way, The Pit and the Pendulum tips its hat a little closer to the infamous Vincent Price film The Witchfinder General in terms of its plot and execution than Roger Corman's original 1961 adaptation of this story, incorporating a sense of swashbuckling rescue and adventure into the subplot involving Antonio's attempt to save his maiden. The American and Italian teamwork on the special effects is gruesome and fun, and the production design is lavish and beautiful in its rich Gothic aesthetic. It works most of the time and manages to be one of the more enchanting early Full Moon productions, despite its gore and cruelty. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer's Tom Towles appears as Don Carlos, Torquemada's head thug, and Empire regular Jeffrey Combs appears as Francisco, one of the monk's more outspoken inquisitors. However, the film hangs most heavily on Rona De Ricci as the object of Torquemada's desires. She's beautiful, luminous, and expressive in her pain, innocence, and desperation. Unfortunately, the talented actress allegedly endured rough treatment during production and never found consistent or satisfying roles beyond The Pit and the Pendulum. Sadly, she took her own life on June 30, 2020, at the age of just 59, cementing her role as Maria as her swan song.
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Arriving on both VHS and LaserDisc on this date, The Pit and the Pendulum was an early but very successful film for Full Moon. Though it didn't become a franchise like its Puppet Master or Subspecies brethren, Band knew when he had a hit on his hands and has always kept the film circulating on various media, keeping it alive and well on collectors' shelves.
The best of the bunch thus far would have to be the 2013 Blu ray, which gave the film a nice, clean 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, along with a couple of new and archival features that included:
• Original Trailer
• VideoZone Volume #2: Behind the Scenes of The Pit and the Pendulum
• The Inquisition of Stuart Gordon
• Rare Bloopers and Outtakes
• Full Moon Trailer Gallery
BITS 'N' PIECES
Traum A Meter:
3 out of 4.
The subject matter is grisly and gory, and the filmmakers know how to put it together. Torture, mutilation, stake burning, flogging, tongue removal, impalement, and, of course, bisection are all on the menu tonight.
Today's Jam: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Learning to Fly" seems like a soft touch for such a hard film, but it would have been coming through your radio as you drove to your local video rental store to check out Band's latest Full Moon adventure.
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