Thursday, January 27, 2011

Movies I'd remake: "The Pit."

There's a story that was actually called "The Sucking Pit."  So I guess by that standards "The Pit," isn't that bad of a title.  It breaks my rule though of never title your work in a way that it can be easily used against it.  It's too easy for some critic to have the headline "The Pit really is the PITS!"  A word to the wise there, bucko, and abolutely free.

The movie is about a truly creepy kid.  I mean he just oozes creep from every pore like sociopathic acne.  Everyone in town feels it and hates the little bugger.  He has no friend except for his teddy bear (kid by the way is 13-14, way tooo old for teddy bears)  When not creeping people out or cutting out the nudes from art books and pasting the librarian's face on top, he goes out into the woods.  Not for anything healthy, of course.  Out there in the woods there's the titular pit, and down there are hungry things.  Well, creepy kid, plus hungry things, means people start disappearing.  Things eventually get out of hand and the things in the pit come out to play. 

OK, in concept not a bad film.  We can all deal with the creepy, evil child.  Things in pits are always great fun.  So how can we make this better?  Well first, let's get some good actors.  The script here is no great shakes but the actors are like community stock theater, and probably were.  They either "act" "like" "this," or ACTTTT LIKE THIS!!!!  Neither really works, you do have to ground your weirdness in some reality usually for it really take root.

Speaking of which the other main thing I would do is strengthen the "character" of Teddy and bring more as part of the plot.  As is he's not only the weird sounding board for creep boy but he does creepy things.  Teddy bears should not move by themselves, ever.  I'm talking to you Teddy #$&*(*@  Ruxtpin.  What we need to do is more directly tie Teddy to the things in the pit.  They already look like teddy bears to some extent, and it makes more sense for Creep kid to have some Carrie psychic powers than for Creep boy to just happen to find things in a pit AND have creepy Carrie psychic powers.  This can lead to a three way mind game with the pit things being the id, and teddy being the super ego. 

Oh, and for God's sake, I'd make it look like people actually fell into the pit and not jumped in because the director said so.  It was as goofy as some monty python skit.


3 comments:

  1. Oh, oops, I'm too close to the edge but then I'm just kind of going to ignore my foot slipping inexorably over, taking it with me...
    Like the idea of involving teddy connecting him with the Pit, looping it all together...

    ReplyDelete
  2. weird is fine but as Checkov said, "if you show a gun in the first act you better fire it by the tird,"

    ReplyDelete
  3. Or it will be a terd..

    Need an 'h' in third

    ReplyDelete