You got problems… check your nearby woods and maybe they'll be solved. Twelve-year-old Jamie is a strange, sexually obsessed loner whose only real friend is a sinister, scheming stuffed teddy bear that talks to him. He has secret that in the nearby woods he finds a large hole in the ground which harbours a pack of prehistoric beasts known as troglodytes. He doesn't know what to feed them, until reads up on them and learns they're carnivorous. So those people who have harassed him or got on his bad side will soon find out about Jamie's secret. However he did tell his secret to one other; the attractive babysitter looking after him since his parents have gone away… but maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

"The Pit" is a very peculiar, but hypnotic b-grade l, drive-in rural psycho-kid outing that's a lot of fun. If you enjoy something rather twisted, senseless and perverse with a dark sense of humour. What it really has going for it is the extra creepy and disquieting performance of Sammy Snyders as Jamie. He striking visual features standout and he superbly plays a disturb mindset, as if he entirely lives in his own world along with his teddy. Quite a seedy little teddy, but still don't know if its because of his imagination or if it was possessed due to one sequence which has its head moving with Jamie being nowhere in the scene. The dialogues between the two are dementedly funny, but still there's a real sincerity about it. The lovely Jeannie Ellis plays the concerned babysitter who tries to communicate and understand him, but she finds out he's truly a little monster. Director Lew Lehman plays it as it is, never trying for anything truly clever. While its low-scale restrictions show it up at times (don't know why it began with a scene that shows up later on), but Lehman's vivid creativity shows in sequences along with the mean-spirited vibe and immensely unpredictable nature. There's a little touch sleaze (the voyeuristic peeping) and blood and gore, but the killings mainly happened off-screen (some moments were quite rib-tickling with how certain people just don't seem to see the pit before taking the trip in) and monsters are nothing more than cheesy costumes with the striking element being the glowing eyes. Most of the time they're in a dark pit, until later on when they come to the surface to cause havoc. The music score is sweepingly full of life, but terribly overwrought and the final shot ends on such a perfectly foreboding and ironic note that goes down so well.

The horror, oh the horror this movie put me through...

THE PIT is one seriously messed up movie. Plain wrong, even, and it inflicted great horror on me, in a most peculiar way. For one reason, basically: The kid. That incredibly annoying, 12-year-old kid. I never ever loathed a child-actor so much in any film. His ugly face. His atrocious hair-do. His big stupid nose. His irritating voice. All his unfortunate facial characteristics fueled by the intolerable things he says and the way he stood there in every scene, acting his way horrendously throughout the whole movie... A friend of mine messed me up quite severely with having me watch this film. It evoked feelings deep inside me I didn't know were there. I hated that kid. I wanted to reach into my TV-set and hit him repeatedly. Frankly put: I wanted him to die, badly. So, can you imagine my joy when I witnessed what finally happened to him at the end.

During the first half of this film, I was convinced I'd be flunking it. I just couldn't get over that little brat. But... my friend was right by telling me I had to see this film, as it's simply an undefinable, demented piece of work. It really is a mess, as the script shows no coherence whatsoever, incorporating so many different elements that you never have any idea where this all is going to lead to. We have: psycho-trite (messed-up kid with imaginary friends), sleaze (all nudity in this film caries seriously disturbing undertones), creature features (trolls in the woods!?!?), demented humor (pulling cows and chasing chickens?), a stuffed toy bear (It moved! Withouth the kid being around even! It frickin' moved, I tell ya!) a warped variety of victims (from kids to wheelchair-bound blind grannies!), ghosts (I'll say that again: Ghosts?) of victims coming back from beyond, a stupid vigilante mob (they honestly believed it was a pack of wild dogs they shot?) and... to top it off: a wonderful, highly memorable 'freeze-frame shock ending' at the end (which I just felt coming during that final scene, and was so hoping for).

THE PIT indeed is so "ga-ga", it belongs up there with William Girdler's THE MANITOU and Ulli Lommel's THE BOOGEYMAN. I hope, for his sake, director Lew Lehman checked himself into rehab after this film, because that must have been some serious dope he was on while making it.

I have no idea what mania exists within Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, but that's where this movie comes from and man, you know how people say that movies feel like transmissions from another dimension? They only think they know what they're talking about and really wish that they had seen this movie.

Everybody in town hates Jamie Benjamin. The kids in school, other kids who don't go to school with him, eben old ladies, everyone he meets either makes fun of him or abuses him. His only friend is Teddy, his stuffed bear, which may be sort of strange, as he's twelve. And yeah, he's starting to get into girls thanks to puberty, including his babysitter, who he soon takes to show one more secret.

You see, Jamie has a pit in the woods filled with Trogs that he feeds with raw meat. Teddy suggests feeding everyone who treats him badly to these monsters and Jamie agrees, but then Sandy gets knocked into the pit and gets devoured. A bitter Jamie allows the Trogs to escape and they attack the town before a militia kills them and he's sent to live with his grandparents.

Is puberty a pit filled with hairy beasts that love to destroy human beings? This film believes that. It's also a movie that has no interest in the thing you call real life. I mean, the original script definitely felt that way, as the Trogs were only in the mind of Jamie and not real.

This is the only movie Lew Lehman ever directed. He did write several films - Phobia - and for the Police Surgeon series, a TV show he also was worked on as the music supervisor. His wife wouldn't allow him to shoot the nude scenes, so the story goes that the screenwriter shot them instead. The only shot involving nudity that Lehman was allowed to film was the skinny dipping scene and only because the actress was his daughter Jennifer, adding one more bit of weirdness to an odd movie.