Before the creeping tendrils of life wrapped themselves around my throat and pulled taut, movie nights were a regular, nigh weekly occurrence. While many of them yielded gold and gemstones to burgeoning cinemasochists in the form of classics like Dead Alive, Re-Animator, Night of the Demon (you and Jeff Goldblum’s mom had to be there), and Return of the Alien’s Deadly Spawn (okay, so I’m the only one who thinks that’s a classic), with a ratio of six movies per night, you were bound to have the majority wind up being atrocious crap that always found itself at the 4:00 Doom timeslot and put everyone to sleep no matter how many 3-liter bottles of Aunt Mabel’s Wild Mountain you’d drunk.

All this rambling about good times gone by brings me to tonight’s movie. I’m relatively certain that Dead Pit was watched at a movie night that I was not present for. I seem to remember hearing Fistula speaking of it. Most of those damn 4:00 Doom movies were just like this one. Odd little direct-to-video-looking late-80’s-to-early-90’s indie flicks with dubious garage-made special effects, community theater acting, and a sound recorded like it was taking place in the next room on a really old set of speakers.

Dr. Colin Ramzi and Dr. Gerald Swan are psychiatrists. Ramzi is working on finding the ethereal place where the spiritual mind connects to the physical brain, and winds up turning evil and murdering all the inmates of their hospital. Swan shoots him down in the basement, walls up the pit where Ramzi buried all the bodies, and closes off that wing of the hospital. Now, what’d it take you to read that last paragraph? Ten, fifteen seconds, maybe? You know how long the credit sequence that establishes that information is? EIGHT AND A HALF FUCKING MINUTES! A couple seconds of movie, ten seconds of credits, a couple seconds of movie, ten seconds of credits, lather rinse throw up. Apparently every single resident of California was involved in the production.

Twenty years later, a woman who claims to have had her memory surgically removed shows up at the hospital for treatment by Dr. Swan. Shortly after her arrival, a huge earthquake rocks the hospital. Hypnotherapy sessions reveal that she is somehow connected to Dr. Ramzi (if you guessed immediately after reading that that she’s his daughter, you get the fantastic no-prize!), who just happens to have been revived by the earthquake (apparently Dr. Ramzi is, at heart, a giant, superintelligent talking dinosaur named Emperor Tyrannus) and is wandering around the hospital killing patients and staff. Jane Doe and Christian Myers, who is in for being a pyromaniac, break out of custody to do battle with the fiendish Ramzi, but Dr. Swan is already dead, the pit in the basement is spewing forth Ramzi’s zombified experiments, and it may be too late…ooooh, suspense!

The plot is actually even more fucktarded than the previous paragraph makes it sound. It makes absolutely no sense, and after years of watching these things, I have a pretty high tolerance for plotholes. Ramzi killed every patient he was experimenting on, but managed to surgically remove the memory of his then-three-year-old daughter before Swan shot him? Why did an earthquake revive him? Why did he wait so long to let his zombies loose? If he’s so all-powerful, why didn’t he just go straight for Jane Doe instead of messing with her and killing off people she didn’t even care about? Since when would an amnesiac ward-of-the-state be dumped in a full-on loony bin (she and Christian are the only non-crazies, the rest of them are bat shit insane) for treatment? Wouldn’t they just throw a dangerous arsonist in jail? Oh, I give up. At least they filmed the thing in a real insane asylum (the closed-down high-security wing of Agnew State Hospital, to be exact) to give it a level of realism.

The end of the movie actually manages to save the whole thing, in a strange switcheroo from the usual dumb ass ending ruining an otherwise good movie. One of the inmates thinks she’s a nun, and runs around sprinkling “holy water” that she’s blessed on all the other inmates, imploring them to repent their sins. Once the zombies break loose and Jane and Christian are running around trying to stop Ramzi, we don’t see her for a while, and just when it looks like they’re going to be corpsebait, she pops back up and melts the zombies with her holy water! In my experience, movies like this don’t usually put enough effort into attention to detail to the point that they establish a hidden plot device up front that turns out to be important for the end. So they have the nun bless the nearby water tower, and Christian blows it up, drowning Ramzi and his zombie horde once and for all…until Jane puts on Ramzi’s ring and HER FUCKING EYES GLOW RED LIKE HIS! Dammit movie, you were doing so well! Just about managed to make it to the can before you shit your pants, but credit where it’s due, I suppose. At least there were no pretentious gay cowboys.