When a movie starts with a line like “Family is forever,” you know you’re about to watch a family get absolutely decimated. Directed by James Kondelik, Pitfall is a gritty, backwoods survival-horror mixed with dysfunctional-family drama.
The Williams family—patriarch Drew (Grant Vlahovic), mother Loraine (Teresa Laverty) and their adult kids, Scott (Marshall Williams) and Ashley (Alex Essoe)—start things off on a camping trip that goes south. A horrific road accident leaves the family shattered, with the survivors carrying scars that run deeper than their physical ones.
Five years later, the guilt-ridden siblings return to the same woods with a group of friends — Lars (Richard Harmon), Gwen (Jordan Claire Robbins) and Charlie (Matt Hamilton) — to go head-to-head with all that trauma. Bad move. They aren’t just battling their own fractured psyches. They’ve wandered into the private hunting grounds of a primal, nameless serial killer played by the legendary MMA fighter Randy Couture. This guy doesn’t do firearms. He prefers axes, arrows, and, as the title spoils for you — elaborate, body-piercing pit traps.
Scott takes a fall into a concealed pit and finds himself impaled through the leg. He starts to hallucinate — straight out of Evil Dead II, lifting a line and even seeing an evil double — and is near death the entire movie.
This seems a bit slow and not in a good way, as characters appear that have nothing to do with the main list of potential victims. Keeping things a bit tighter would have benefitted this film, but you know, I judge all slashers made after 1981 pretty harshly. Your mileage through these woods may vary.
You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.
