Review of “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1961)

The past Saturday pizza and bad movie night was a return to the schlock of yesteryear.

Plot:

In the sixteenth-century, Englishman Francis Barnard (John Kerr) arrives at a foreboding castle seeking news about his sister Elizabeth’s (Barbara Steele) recent death. His sister’s widower, Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price), and his younger sister, Catherine (Luana Anders), give him a chilly reception. The only explanation they offer him for his sister’s death was something about “blood disease.”

While Barnard accepts that Nicholas is indeed mourning Elizabeth, there’s something rotten in Spain. He wishes to see where she’s buried.

A visit from Nicholas’ friend, Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone), brings the news that Elizabeth died of heart failure. She was scared to death.

Thoughts:

The movie has barely a nodding acquaintance with Poe’s story of the same name, which is about a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition undergoing a fantastic series of tortures, including being strapped to a table while a blade swings ever so lower over him. It scared the daylights out of me when I first read it at about eleven.

The movie adds characters and a whole story not in Poe’s work. The old castle, the torture chamber, the memories of past agonies the Medinas’ father Sebastian (also played by Vincent Price) inflicted on his victims, and the depictions of an angry sea pounding against the rocky shoreline surrounding the castle give the tale a heavy, gothic air.

Nicholas comes to believe his dead wife is haunting him. Barnard comes to believe Nicholas is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. What is he hiding? Is this ghost business some elaborate ruse? Why does he keep those torture devices beneath the castle?

(Note to the history buffs: the Spanish Inquisition did not use the instruments shown in the movie. They had much simpler ways of torturing, maiming, and killing people. But the reader has probably figured this movie isn’t a documentary.)

Vincent Price is enjoyable to watch in his overacting, first as the loving, grieving husband, then as the nut, then—while screws continue to come loose and fall away—as the dangerous nut.

Yet true vengeance is reserved not for him but for another and arrives straight from the Department of Ironic Punishments.

This is over-the-top from beginning to end in a way that one can imagine Poe thinking, “Hmmm. Yes. Wish I’d written that.”

The Roger Corman/Vincent Price movies are not for everyone, but I find them a delightful guilty pleasure not to be taken seriously.

This can be watched with a whole slew of ads on Tubi:

Or on the Internet Archive:

It can also be rented on places like Amazon TV, YouTube, and Apple TV.



Title: The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

Directed by
Roger Corman

Writing Credits
Richard Matheson…(screenplay)
Edgar Allan Poe…(story “The Pit and the Pendulum”)

Cast (in credits order)
Vincent Price…Nicholas Medina / Sebastian Medina
John Kerr…Francis Barnard
Barbara Steele…Elizabeth Barnard Medina
Luana Anders…Catherine Medina
Antony Carbone…Doctor Charles Leon

Released: 1961
Length: 1 hour, 20 minutes