3 hours ago
10
No low-budget horror movie can apparently now be greenlighted without featuring the obligatory posse of supremely irritating victims ripe for the culling. Pitfall director James Kondelik is evidently unbothered that this might make his bloody agenda too blatant; even his “sympathetic” characters – a pair of grieving siblings on a wilderness trip to commemorate their parents – bleat out their issues at such length that it’s sweet relief when a maniac woodsman (played by former UFC fighter Randy Couture) arrives to shut them up in a laborious and bombastic survival horror.
Pitfall plays a bit as if the cast of Friends had strayed into Deliverance. Ashley (Alexandra Essoe) and her brother Scott (Marshall Williams) are returning several years later to the forest location where their parents died in a car accident after hitting a deer. Their respective other halves, Charlie (Matt Hamilton) and Gwen (Jordan Claire Robbins), are in tow – as well as carping spare wheel Lars (Richard Harmon). But Scott and Charlie’s credentials as outdoorsmen are rumbled when, fleeing from wolves, the former falls into a spiked hunting pit of the type he’d warned everyone to avoid a few hours earlier.
Kondelik, co-writing with Victor Rose, tries for a mildly fractured structure that kicks off with a prologue putting a seemingly unrelated mother and child in the redneck crosshairs, then intersperses Ashley and co’s search for Scott with another separate manhunt, as well as flashbacks to the parental catastrophe. One death is recounted via a camcorder recording, sadistically left for Scott to watch at the bottom of the pit. But this profusion of perspectives is haphazard, and only occasionally adds extra force to the main storyline – like when the stricken Scott is flooded by guilty memories.
This interlude is yet another waypoint on Pitfall’s long, heavily signposted melodrama trail, from Ashley’s alcoholism, to her estrangement from Scott and Gwen, to her newly discovered pregnancy. Kondelik takes every opportunity to ladle out another helping of schmaltz – after a gratuitous decapitation, gouging or centipede burrowing into someone’s leg wound. The overblown finale unites the family therapy and gorehound strands, as the demonic hunter does his atavistic worst – while everyone else competes to sacrifice themselves for each other (and vocalises their need to do so). It’s like the Scary Movie franchise did a splatterhouse Last of the Mohicans skit.
