Dreadfully Boring

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)** 1/2 (out of 4) The Crimson Executioner is sentenced to death and his body sealed inside a tomb. Flash-forwards hundreds of years and a photographer and his models show up at a castle where they want to take some pictures. The new owner doesn't want them there but finally agree to let them stay for the night. Then the owner takes the identity of The Crimson Executioner and decides to kill everyone off.BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is a low-budget film that in a lot of ways reminded me of HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND. Both films aren't all that well-made and they certainly weren't going to win any Oscars but at the same time both of them were just so far out there that you couldn't help but have some fun with them. This film here manages to have some eye-opening scenes that are quite graphic and suggestive for a film from 1965 and it's these scenes that make it worth watching.This thing clocks in at 74-minutes and it's pretty much non-stop torture from the word go. Sure, we get the opening execution and then a brief introduction but the majority of that running time is devoted to a bunch of hot ladies being tied up and tortured in one way or another. The highlight has to be one sequence where a lady is tied up to a spider web with arrows pointing at her to prevent her rescue or escape. The other problem is the giant spider that is full of poison and heading towards her! This scene and the look of the spider is insane but oh so enjoyable.The film shouldn't be taken overly serious and there's not really a reason to bash it's performances, the dubbing or anything else for that matter. The film was made to try and shock people and I'm sure it was successful in its day. The brief nudity, scantly clad women and violence is something I'm sure outraged people at drive-ins across the country.

The opening credits read, "Based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade." Well yes, in that they both come from Europe. But I'm guessing de Sade never created a character known as the Crimson Executioner. (Haven't read the man, so I can't say for sure.)The plot: in rural Italy, a publisher, his photographer and models come to a centuries-old castle to take pictures for the book jackets of a horror series. The castle's owner, Travis Anderson (Mickey Hargitay), believes that he is descended from the Crimson Executioner, a 17th-century madman whose torture and killing of young women earned him death by the Iron Maiden. The clearly insane Anderson takes it upon himself to pick up where the CE left off. He spends the night torturing his houseguests in the castle's well-equipped dungeon until he is killed in "the poison embrace of the Lover of Death," one of his numerous torture devices.Once Anderson "becomes" the CE, he stops referring to himself in the first person. Now it's, "The Crimson Executioner will torture you," or, "No one escapes the wrath of the Crimson Executioner!" Makes me wonder if Bob Dole ever saw this film.The dialogue is dreadful, and not just due to the execrable dubbing job; I suspect it was written that way in the original Italian. Example: "I had to abandon the world. Mankind is made up of inferior creatures, spiritually and physically deformed, who would have corrupted the harmony of my perfect body!"The castle provides a suitable backdrop for what is supposed to be a Gothic horror story but is nowhere near horrifying. The suspense scenes offer no suspense while the torture scenes are surprisingly mild-- even when the torture devices themselves are diabolically clever. One scene offers the most hilariously inept fake spider ever to grace the big screen.This movie is so awful, I wouldn't like it even if it were good.

Before special effects wizard and triple Academy Award winner Carlo Rambaldi worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Dune and E.T., he created not only the legendary size-doesn't-matter giant spider, but also the Lover of Death rag doll and the Tittie-Slice Rotating System for Massimo Pupillo's Bloody Pit of Horror. When Jayne Mansfield's ex-hubby Mickey Hargitay ("Mr. Universe 1958") heard that Fellini cinematographer Luciano Trasatti (I Vitelloni) was on board as well, he happily signed the 1000-Lire-contract to star as The Crimson Executioner, a saucy blend of Batman's Robin, Bertie Bizarro and the Muscle Beach Molester. Though credited to the influence of the Marquis de Sade, the script much more obviously refers to Octave Mirbeau's pre-surreal torture classic Le Jardin des supplices – a highly inventive, stranger-than-fiction dungeon purification wackorama with Hargitay in the role of his life: "The Executioner will torture you ... to death." Probably for a reason: Two years before, Jayne had booted him out of The Pink Palace, their Beverly Hills mansion with the famous heart-shaped pool. He, former plumber Mickey Hargitay, had built it himself, and that's why the Torture of Icy Water has the master touch. Got the subtext? Spell it out, not too loud: This is catharsis.

I'm probably in the wrong place. Most of the reviewers have a connection to this genre, so maybe it's unfair for me to write about it. I'm looking at it as a film in the general sense. This is utter crap. It always amazes me how people in horror movies go about their business, even though their group is being murdered methodically by some unknown force. This happens here. The girls continue to pose, even though there are less of them. At least they sent one guy to the police; that's something. The rest of it is exploitative soft-core pornography. Mickey Hargetay is interesting. I like his daughter on Law And Order: SVU. She's a better actress than he is an actor. Almost everything out of his mouth is so stupid that at no point could I care. Then there's all that torture. I got a kick out of the girls going around a cylinder while he pushed blades toward them, cutting them a little at a time. Just a terrible movie.