MOVIE REVIEW : Stuart Gordon’s Stylish ‘Pit’ Done In by a Flood of Blood

Stuart Gordon’s startling free adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” (at the UA Egyptian) has everything one would expect of the director of “Re-Animator”: bravura style, superb production design, an atmospheric play of light and shadow, an appropriately heady romantic score, strong performances--and a darkly comic, even campy sense of humor.

Despite all these virtues, which attest to Gordon’s formidable wit and talent, the film is inescapably morbid: it’s set almost entirely in a castle dungeon where we are subjected to a nonstop display of the hideous torture of men and women, particularly women.

Gordon and writer Dennis Paoli clearly are against the abuse of women and, for that matter, use their highly developed sense of the absurd to attack all forms of oppression against humanity made in the name of religion. But their film depicts violence and cruelty in such quantity and to such extremes that finally it doesn’t matter what attitude they take toward them or even that they affirm the transcendent power of love--there’s just too much gore, and the film lapses into numbing exploitation.

Though “The Pit and the Pendulum” goes way overboard, it is consistently inventive in its outrageous, often comical way. One key and provocative inspiration is suggesting that the Spanish Inquisition was fundamentally an expression of warped sexuality. Its Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor (played brilliantly by Lance Henriksen as a gaunt, tormented figure of implacable evil), is a raving, impotent sadomasochist who falls in love with the innocent Maria (Rona De Ricci), wife of an equally innocent baker (Jonathan Fuller), both of whom become trapped in the Torquemada’s chamber of horrors. His dreaded presence and his incessant cruelties make the case (all too literally) that the attempt to separate the spirit and the flesh may be the ultimate obscenity.

There’s no denying the spectacular and suspenseful staging of the film’s climactic title sequence--the only element from Poe that both this film and Roger Corman’s version of three decades ago are faithful to. But well before this, “The Pit and the Pendulum” (rated a wholly appropriate R) has become too much of a turnoff.

‘The Pit and the Pendulum’

Lance Henriksen: Torquemada

Rona De Ricci: Maria

Jonathan Fuller: Antonio

Frances Bay: Esmeralda

A Paramount Pictures release of a Full Moon Entertainment presentation. Director Stuart Gordon. Producer Albert Band. Executive producer Charles Band. Screenplay by Dennis Paoli; adapted from the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Cinematographer Adolfo Bartoli. Editor Andy Horvitch. Costumes Michela Gisotti. Music Richard Band. Art director Giovanni Natalucci.

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (for scenes of torture and sex-related nudity, and for language).