Boring, long, and too preachy.

Beautiful, moving film.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

From 1989 comes THE DEAD PIT directed by Brett Leonard and starring the late Jeremy Slate. An evil insane doctor is conducting cuckoo experiments on the patients of a mental hospital, when the good Dr. Jeremy Slate shoots him dead in order to stop his insanity, then seals him up in his hidden pit with what apears to drywall spackle. Yeah....that'll hold him in there. Fast forward twenty years later, and Jane Doe arrives at the hospital not remembering a thing about her past or who she is. An earthquake strikes and TOTALLY RUINS THE SPACKLE JOB, reopening the crypt of insanity. Can Jane Doe overcome her own murky past and her own proclivity for running through a mental hospital in a t-shirt and bikini panties?This plot runs as insane as a Stuart Gordon film like From Beyond or Re-Animator. It's fun to watch, if you don't have any hang-ups about stories that make sense. There is a lot of style here from Brett Leonard, the acting is okay-ish, thanks mostly to Jeremy Slate, and there is plenty of gore. True horror fans should have this one on their radar.

THE DEAD PIT is a low budget zombie splatter movie given the high definition treatment by the Code Red DVD company. They've got their hands on the unrated version which is full of extra gore scenes including graphic scenes of brain surgery and the like. The setting is a creepy mental hospital where a mad doctor was entombed in the basement after doing illegal experiments on his patients. In the present day, an earthquake sees him released to carry on his crazy business once more. Sure, this low budget production is rough around the edges and highly cheesy, with ham acting throughout, but it's also quite amusing. The exploitation value is high, as evinced in a scene in which a woman is sprayed with a water hose which manages to rip off her top. She also spends half the running time running around in her underwear. The emphasis, however, is on the bloodshed and it flows quite freely here. There are slasher-style murders (seemingly inspired by DRILLER KILLER at times), zombie attacks, and the aforementioned mutilation and surgery. It's too cheesy to be affecting, but it is fun.

Found wandering the streets, a woman is admitted to a mental health facility where she refutes her case of amnesia and begins to have crazy nightmares about a former doctor who practiced medical experiments to reanimate the dead and must race to stop him unleash a horde of undead into our world.This here is one of the very best 80s cheesefests ever made. One of the main reasons for that is the rather great story to this, as there's much more to this one than what's expected. The fact that it throws in much more than normal, from the nightmarish dreams to the therapy sessions and her connection to the doctor's past through the flash visions that pop up, this one does manage to stay interesting for the seemingly disparate story elements are nicely woven together into a rich story that has a lot of twists and turns to keep it going. When it hits the second half, there's as much goodness from the action as the first half, which includes the zombie massacre on the staff and patients that offers up some great moments, and there's also the big scenes in the basement of the facility where all the zombies are kept and operated on. There's also the greatness of the finale where the film goes for a larger scale than expected and really makes this fun as there's some solid chasing around the abandoned buildings as well as the complete destruction of a water tower and the resulting flood it unleashes manages to employ some nice action into the proceedings to make it come to an end. The other really big part of this is that there's so much bloodshed in the film. This is incredibly bloody, packed with loads of gore and messy features as there's literally no end to the ripped off limbs, a lobotomy pick through the eyes, scores of decapitations, brain surgeries and really great gunshots to the head. Even the dead are bloody, full of wounds, all slimy and blood-streaked, many of them bald in spotted and mildewed hospital gowns as they shuffle and stutter their way to wreak havoc. There are many great scenes of them coming for the main characters lit from behind in an awesome setting which just makes them that much more impressive-looking. Alongside the mental hospital setting, which is completely creepy, offers up some unnerving atmosphere and just gives the whole thing a really uneasy feeling, these here are what make the film worthwhile as it doesn't have a whole lot of flaws to it. The main one is that the plot is rather hard to get into. There's a lot of things going on in here, from the amnesia victim to the past relationship that's remained hidden and the rather clichéd manner in which it all manages to occur at the end, and while all of these make the film feel smart, trying to piece together the way it all unfolds is just plain exhausting. Worse is the whole cliché spook of the main character that can only see the main villain's ridiculous vanishing act ploy, as there's not a lot of them, but what they lack in number they make up for in groaning ability. Otherwise, there isn't much wrong with this one.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Brief Nudity.

Hell.. I have watched scores of horror films of all genres, liked many and trashed quite a few, in this very portal. All said and done, this too is a '80s style horror film, with gore, campy effects, shambling zombies, evil doctors, half-naked females, scary hospitals and whatnot. There are loopholes aplenty, but can we really expect logic in a horror film? They are there for our entertainment - love them or leave them.In this film, the hospital scenes are satisfyingly eerie, the nurses and orderlies expectedly intimidating, and the lead female, Cheryl Lawson, attractive enough. Amazingly, in the apparently high security asylum, male and female patients freely intermingle, and even visit each others rooms. Wow.. now that creates certain possibilities :) Cheryl is endowed with a delicious figure and attractive good looks.. plus she runs around the corridors at night, wearing bikini-cut panties and a short slip. Yummy! Amazingly, neither IMDb nor Wikipedia have any info on Cheryl till date. Seems a pity, considering that she carried the entire film on her.. umm.. shoulders?(I am kidding).Watchable for the antics of Cheryl, the evil doctor and the creepy hospital building, if nothing else. The idea of drenching zombies with holy water seems to be a novel one. Usually, they appear to be indestructible..Post-script: Can anybody explain to me why Hollywood zombies always want to attack and eat living humans? I mean, whats the logic behind it? Oh Jesus.. again I am searching for logic.. how stupid of me :)