203. Bloody Pit of Horror

203. Bloody Pit of Horror aka Il boia scarlatto (1965)
Director: Massimo Pupillo
Writers: Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale
From: Pure Terror
Watch: archive.org; Rifftrax

A group of models looking to shoot book covers goes into a castle that used to be the home of the torturous Crimson Executioner. It’s current resident starts killing them through various medieval means.

Another movie that I watched several times before in the pre-PD Project days. My copy came from The Dead Walk 10-Movie Pack. I already uploaded to the Internet Archive nearly eleven years ago. It’s a silly little piece of Italian not-quite sleaze, and I opted to watch the Rifftrax version this time around. During the opening credits featuring a car driving along a road for minutes on end, one of the riffs is, “Kind of a Manos goes to Europe feel about this.” They’re not wrong.

A group of cover girls arrives at a castle that their producer hopes to use as a set for book cover photos. Cause that was a thing at a time I guess? I was born in 1980 so my only experience with book cover models was Fabio, and even then, he’d pose for portraits as opposed to photos. But anyway. The castle is locked and no one answers the bell so, naturally, they break in. The owner initially tells them to leave, but relents upon seeing the producer’s female assistant. Then, during the shoots, a male model is impaled by a pendulum device.

The photography sequence reveals both the motive and tone of the movie—scantily-clad women in peril and a Scooby-Doo-ish level of camp.

Gradually every character ends up in a torture device at the whims of the Crimson Executioner, but everything looks terrible and hokey. The end result of every device is to gradually strip the women a little further than they are at the present moment. Imagine lingerie models having their lingerie removed literally thread-by-thread and you’ll have the right idea. There’s never any nudity, but there is the suggestion that with enough time, and if the victim doesn’t die, and the devices aren’t clearly cardboard, there might, eventually, conceivably, be a bit of titty.

I'm the metaphorical budget literalized!

I do have to note that the torture devices are at once hilariously cheap and hilariously convoluted. One women is tied to a spider web with a giant stuffed spider coming ever nearer to eventually prick her with a poisoned needle. No one can save her because the floor is criss-crossed with massive tripwires that will set off arrows embedded in the wall, killing whoever tripped them. Our hero tries to save her by crawling along the floor, which is pretty easy to do (as would be walking around the edge of the room or just stepping in the massive gaps between the tripwires), but gets there just a moment too late.

Huh?

I’m all over the place with this movie because it doesn’t follow any plot, it’s just, “people show up, start dying.” So the Crimson Executioner was a 17th-century madman obsessed with purity who tortured people he regarded as sinning to death. He gets sealed in the hokiest iron maiden I’ve ever seen and dies. The castle’s current owner is an ex body builder, also obsessed with human perfection, who lionizes the Crimson Executioner and starts murdering everyone in the castle. The woman he saw is his ex-fiancée, but when she tells him to stop killing, he rejects love as weak and an imperfection.

Anyway, inevitably the hero gets caught, escapes, the villain thinks he’s dead, but they have one final battle. The villain falls against one of his own traps, gets poisoned, and dies. By this point, everyone except the hero and the fiancée are dead, but it’s cool cause they’re each other’s love interest and they leave. THE END.

The movie’s stupid, but it’s short, clocking in at just under 75 minutes, and it’s just silly. It’s a cheapo exploitation flick, but it doesn’t fall into the trap a lot of those do by being grim or rapey. As I said above, it feels like an adult Scooby-Doo, only the gang is too stupid to figure out what’s really happening.

The movie’s in the public domain and, as mentioned above, I uploaded a copy here almost eleven years ago. The Rifftrax version is a much better print, but the riffing is only generally okay. It’s not bad, but it feels like they hammered on some things a bit and went for the obvious targets. You could do as well with a group of your friends, and I recommend you do. It’s not good enough to watch on its own, but perfect for laughing at with people, even kids in the preteen age group. Your mileage may vary, but it doesn’t get too sexually explicit and, like I said, there’s no nudity, so it may not be the worst movie to use to bring an 11 or 12-year-old into the world of riffing and camp cinema.