The original Edgar Allan Poe short story was just a mood piece wherein an unnamed character, which we learn almost nothing about, sits in darkness in a pit as the titular pendulum swings slowly downwards. Most film adaptations of the story – notedly Roger Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum (1961) – have to invent an entire backstory to the torture scenes in order to bring the piece up to feature length. Here the pendulum scenes are of no particular important to the story – just another in the line of horrors that the central character serves up – while the scene with the person tied up underneath the descending pendulum is not even the climactic set-piece as it is in other productions. The script also adds Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Cask of Amontillado (1846) to the mix, which for all the real Poe present could equally as validly have been served up as the title of the film as The Pit and the Pendulum.

Dennis Paoli’s script takes the interesting step of not only regarding witches as persecuted innocents but also as real practitioners and goes with the notion advocated by many modern Wicca practitioners that witchcraft was not about diabolism but rather about Earth magic, herbalism and midwifery. The Pit and the Pendulum is spearheaded by the Satanic character of Torquemada who is shown wearing belts of nails as penance, keeps Damoclean swords on threads above his bed so that God might strike him down if he is doing the wrong thing, and kneels on broken pottery begging to be whipped to quench his desire. With his head shaven to a pencil-thin tonsure and single cartoonish cowlick, Lance Henriksen appears to be having the time of his life. Unfortunately, Henriksen’s insistence of punctuating everything by flourishes of his hands while mellifluously voicing dialogue with his head to one side proves more distracting than it ever does sinister.

Equally, so too does Stuart Gordon’s familiar campy, splatter-heavy approach. Gordon sets in from the pre-credits prologue with a skeleton being exhumed and then flogged, sending its bones flying everywhere, and the remains pounded down to dust to be used in an hourglass by Torquemada. The prospect of sitting through a grand tour of the Spanish Inquisition conducted as black comedy is something that surely verges on bad taste. However, other scenes, particularly the unsettling sequence where Lance Henriksen cuts out Rona De Ricci’s tongue, are played with a disturbing grimness. Unfortunately, Stuart Gordon’s liking for cartoony splatter and black comedy sinks The Pit and the Pendulum as a serious exercise.

Stuart Gordon’s other films include the splatter black comedy Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986), Dolls (1987), the live-action Transformers film Robot Jox (1990), the vampire tv movie Daughter of Darkness (1990), the future prison film Fortress (1993), Castle Freak (1995), Space Truckers (1996), the Ray Bradbury adaptation The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998), Dagon (2001), the non-genre David Mamet adaptation Edmond (2005) and Stuck (2007).