I have nowhere to go after telling you that I could feel Dr. Mulholland slicing my sack open, pulling my vas deferens through the hole, and cutting them in half. Have you ever been struck in the balls? If you have, then you kind of know what it felt like, except if instead of a boot or a fist or what-have-you, your balls were struck by a giant wielding a war hammer made of molten lava and hate.

After all that, a boring Italian gothic horror flick is a walk in the park. Mr. Parks and his crew of models are looking for a castle to shoot the cover of a horror anthology. They happen upon the castle of one Travis Anderson, who doesn’t want visitors, but allows them to stay after they whine him into submission.

No sooner than they set up their photo shoots, models start dying. Anderson warns them that they are being picked off by the spirit of the Crimson Executioner, an insane killer who lived in the castle centuries ago. Turns out what we have here is another dumbass Scooby-Doo ending, as the killer is actually Travis dressed up in a Crimson Executioner costume killing the models because – I’m not fucking kidding here – they disturbed his special look-in-the-mirror-and-rub-oil-on-his-muscles-because-he-has-the-perfect-body me time. Seems he took over the castle because the curse of the Executioner kept the locals away so he could enjoy his narcissism in solitude. Well, by solitude I mean him and his handful of henchmen who all dress in identical tight white slacks and striped blue-and-yellow shirts and look like living Jack Kirby drawings.

The first half of this thing is stultifyingly boring. I honestly considered turning it off and finding a different movie to watch. Gothic horror in the right hands can evoke a creeping atmosphere of brooding terror which sticks with you long after the lights come back up. Gothic horror in the wrong hands (i.e. the hands of people who think tired one-liners and a soundtrack that sounds like the bastard music love-child of Eegah and the Adam West “Batman” series make for a good horror flick) puts you to sleep faster than that green butterfly who steals people’s souls on TV.

So there I was, finger on the STOP button, when the spider scene came up. Rick the Hero finds one of the models tied (yes, not stuck to the strands, but tied with Boyscout knots) to a spider web in a room so full of tripwires it looks like Cthulhu got stoned and tried to make a cat’s cradle. Each tripwire leads to one of several hundred armed bows set into the wall, ensuring one false move and anyone crossing the floor will look like a giant porcupine used him for batting practice. The spider itself, while not quite as bargain-basement as the one in Nude for Satan, is truly a sight that needs to be seen to be believed. It looks like a tattier, six-legged version of the one from Horrors of Spider Island, but instead of having hands as its cartoonishly anthropomorphic feature, it has a huge freakin’ Jew nose.

From here on out, while not exactly kicking into high gear, the movie does get quite a bit more entertaining. It never again lives up to that Red Sea pedestrian spider, but it’s at least tolerable. Mickey “father of Mariska from ‘Law & Order: SVU’” Hargitay gives a suitably goofy, eye-bulging embarrassment of a performance, and the final confrontation in the titular pit is chuckle-worthy, as Travis stands by watching while his main henchman has his ass handed to him by Rick before meeting defeat at the hands of a poison mannequin. Yes, the guy who spent decades of his life honing his body to perfection in his castle full of gay henchmen is defeated in under a minute by a doughy pulp novelist half his size.

The Moral of the Story: If you promise a bloody pit of horror, at least make an attempt to deliver something more than a drippy basement of mild discomfort and one enormous Jewish spider.

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