After numerous instances of wrestling the eldritch imagination of H.P. Lovecraft, director Stuart Gordon chose to turn his attentions to another, timeless author of the macabre in the form of Edgar Allen Poe. But while he chose to adapt the famous tale of The Pit And The Pendulum, rather than wrapping himself up into the velvet blanket of eyeball rolling gothic horror that filmmaker Roger Corman enacted back in his classic 60s version, Gordon typically went in for a far more sadistic approach.
While Monty Python stubbonly insisted that no one could expect the Spanish Inquisition, Gordon made damn sure it was going to be a chore to endure it, delving into the kind of inhuman treatment seen in the likes of other such unsettling religious horror flicks such as Michael Reeves Witchfinder General and even Ken Russell’s infamous The Devils. While all this sadism might have seemed an odd fit for Charlie Band’s Full Moon Studios, it certainly was a snug fit of Gordon who was no stranger to infusing his horror with countless sexual perversions.
Simple baker, Antonio, and his virtuous wife, Maria try to live their simple lives in the midst of the brutal times of the Holy Inquisition as it tears through Toledo, Spain in 1942, and even though the devout Maria disapproves of the cruelty meted out by the Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, the couple realises that keeping their heads down is the best course of action lest they be branded as heretics themselves.
However, due to a cruel twist of fate, the two end up at a public burning and after Maria tries to intervene with the public lashing of a young child, she finds her face to face with Torquemada himself who, unable to deny his feelings for her, decides she much be a witch too and has her arrested while Antonio is knocked unconscious. Within the dark bowers of the torture chambers, the young woman is subjected to numerous, humiliating tests that show that hypocrisy is just as rife as suffering in this “holy” place.
While Antonio attempts to break in and save her, Torquemada becomes obsessed with Maria, utterly unable to reconcile his lust into anything other than religious mania and acts of unbelievable cruelty, but Maria manages to find a small, sliver of salvation in the cells thanks to kindly witch Esmeralda.
However, when the Pope sends an emissary from Rome to cease the endless barbarism, it causes Torquemada to up his game and somehow become even more vicious.
But as his feelings for Maria have him spiralling, the Grand Inquisitor has his ultimate method of torture waiting in the wings, a device of ultimate pain that can only be described as a pit and a pendulum.
The sadistic yet cynical nature of Gordon’s Pit is fairly evident from the very first scene, where a moldy corpse is removed from its tomb to suffer twenty posthumous lashes for acts of heresy and this almost ludicrous act of hypocrisy and bureaucracy colliding, pretty much lays out what to expect from this incredibly grim film. Laced with humour so black and searing, you could use it to tar a road, the moments of staggering inhumanity are laced with spots of torturers complaining about wages and job security like they’re working the late shift at a 7-Eleven which are born from Gordon’s discoveries from actual log books that the men hired to do such grim work would keep track of their lunch breaks between crushing the wills of their victims. Thus we get moments of inquisitors engaging in bored, matter of fact questioning while an old lady is callously waterboarded and jailers gambling while another poor soul is removed from an iron maiden in hardly the best of conditions.
While it results in a 90s horror experience that was somewhat unique, it also proves to be a wildly uneven experience which takes in religious zealotry, romance, broad comedy, sexual perversion, extreme gore and even a spot of swashbuckling that all ends in a climax that basically borrows heavily from William Lustig’s 80s sleeze epic, Maniac. Quickest way to indicate that the film is literally all over the place is simply to take a look at the film’s performances which all feel like they’ve come from completely different movies. While the two leads, Jonathan Fuller (clad in an distractingly large cod piece) and Rona De Ricci (who in particular gets some incredibly uncomfortable treatment here) are as bland and virtuous as the bread their characters make, character actors Jeffery Combs, Stephen Lee and Frances Bay all approach their roles with a tongue pushed deep into their respective cheeks. Even Oliver Reed shows up inna guest spot as a typically sozzled Cardinal and as a result, the accents are as muddled as the tone with some actors trying for Spanish, other shooting for English, Reed going hard on the Italian and some not even trying at all (Bay’s Esmeralda sounds vaguely like she’s from New Jersey). However, if none of this bothers you, then Gordon’s Pit And The Pendulum is something of an impressively unpredictable watch, although it’s one that’s frequently let down by its budget which leaves some of the action beats looking like it’s been staged like an episode of Adam West’s Batman.
However, as truly mental as it is, two things keep The Pit And The Pendulum being inherently watchable and while the first is some outlandish horror set pieces (watch Esmeralda scarf down gunpowder on her way to a bonfire only to explode like a claymore during her execution, peppering the front row with fatal bone shrapnel), the second is something all the more uncontrollable.
Lance Henriksen has always been an actor of such incredible intensity that I’ve often marveled how he constantly ended up in countless low budget roles that were well and truly beneath his talent, but with the role of Torquemada, the craggy actor launches out of the gates with a performance so sinister and so far removed from the spots of humor scattered around him, its impossible not to watch transfixed. Gordon has never met a sexually perverted villain he hasn’t gone deliriously overboard with (his rogues gallery is fucking rotten with them), but in Henriksen’s bloody hands, the Grand Inquisitor becomes one of the actor’s most impassioned performances ever. With his glaring eyes, severe baldcap and a proclivity to whispering scripture before roaring orders like a maniac. In addition to this, he also willingly sleeps under a dangling sword, self flagulates regularly and has the disconcerting habit of vomiting blood when the jig is up, and as a result the movie struggles to contain him. While he probably succeeds in offsetting the humour even more than he should, it nails the religious fervour of the Inquisition in chilling fashion: basically, come for Henriksen, stay for the weird.
While Gordon cheekily adds other nods to Poe’s works with someone being walled up whilst alive and even a premature burial being thrown in for good measure, this is as ultimately as Poe as an episode of Married: With Children, but during a time when the genre was in a state of flux, it was good to see such a horror veteran refusing to rest on his laurels. Even if his grasp on the movie’s tone tends to swing like the titular torture device itself…
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