Pitfall Review – Surviving the Great Pit is like your Friends getting lost in Rescue | Video

NA low-budget horror movie can now be turned on without showing the chance of the most outrageous ones ready to be ripped off. Pitfall director James Kondelik apparently isn’t worried that this will make his bloody agenda more visible; even his “sympathizers” – two grieving brothers on a trip to the desert to remember their parents – reveal their stories at such length that it’s a sweet relief when a wooden madman (played by former UFC fighter Randy Couture) arrives to lock them into a life of horror and danger.

Pitfall plays a bit like Friends players straying into Deliverance. Ashley (Alexandra Essoe) and her brother Scott (Marshall Williams) return years later to the forest where their parents died in a car accident after hitting a deer. Their other half, Charlie (Matt Hamilton) and Gwen (Jordan Claire Robbins), are along for the ride – along with carping wheel Lars (Richard Harmon). But Scott and Charlie’s identity as outsiders is felt when, fleeing from wolves, the former falls into the same hunting pit that he had warned everyone to avoid a few hours earlier.

Kondelik, writing with Victor Rose, attempts a slow-breaking plan that begins with the introduction to put a seemingly unrelated mother and child in the redneck crosshairs, then joins Ashley and co’s search for Scott and a different manhunt, as well as memories of the parents’ misfortune. One death is recounted via a camcorder recording, sadly left for Scott to watch at the bottom of the pit. But this emotional overload is haphazard, and sometimes only serves to add intensity to the larger story – as in the troubled Scott’s recollections of guilt.

This pairing is another step in Pitfall’s long, well-known journey, from Ashley’s addiction, to her relationship with Scott and Gwen, to her newly discovered pregnancy. Kondelik takes every opportunity to dish out another treat of schmaltz – after a random cut, drill or centipede in someone’s leg wound. The special ending combines family support with gorehound leashes, as a demon hunter does at its worst – as everyone competes to give themselves to each other (and mention their need to do so). It’s like the Scary Movie franchise made a splatterhouse Last of the Mohicans skit.