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I had intended to watch The Dead Pit for the letter D, but holy hell, is that ever not an undiscovered gem of the VHS era. I had no problems with the actors or Code Red’s traditionally terrific transfer, it’s just dull. There’s an undead surgeon dragging people to a basement laboratory and it’s dull. The heroine looks like a buxom Claudia Christian with ridiculously scanty sleeping attire and it’s still dull. It was the Unrated Director’s cut and it ran over an hour and forty minutes and
I bailed after 30 minutes of dull and put in something insane and Indonesian.
By way of contrast, let me put it this way: in the first fifteen minutes of Dangerous Seductress, we have a thrilling car chase ending in a bloody crash, a gooily reanimated witch, blood drinking, and an attempted rape. There’s no way it can possibly keep up this pace, but it is bracing after the stultifying fare that preceded it.
The car chase is a trio of jewel thieves on the lam from the cops after their heist. The pursuit is apparently the fault of the driver, because the guy in the passenger seat keeps slugging him for it. I suppose there is no greater indictment of the mental faculties of the average criminal than repeatedly clocking the guy who is driving during a high speed chase. Well, eventually things run their course, as it were, and the getaway car, and criminal body parts, go flying.
One of the pieces of jewelry is a locket, and once blood drips on it, it starts smoking, so you know something’s up. A severed finger also stands on end and hops over to the locket to be eaten (makeup effects artist Steve Prouty, in an interview on the Mondo Macabro DVD, is amused that the finger he designed to crawl is put to such absurd use). This in turn causes The Evil Queen (Amy Weber) to reassemble her skeleton and play-doh-like flesh to assemble over it, like the resurrection in Hellraiser on a strict budget. It’s not entirely successful, as she’s still a half-rotten corpse, but an obliging dog comes by and attempts to steal a nice leg bone, with the result that his head is ripped off and his blood drunk.
There are still forces keeping her confined (represented by underground hands holding her legs). so it’s lucky for her that in Los Angeles, Susan (Tonya Lawson) fights off her abusive drunken boyfriend when he tries to rape her. Lucky because she flies to Jakarta to join her model sister Linda (Kristin Anin). No no, hold on, I’m getting to the lucky part. The beaten and bloody Susan calls Linda during her birthday party, and Linda’s boyfriend Bob has brought along the occult adviser for his documentary, Beko (Mick Camichael), who gives her a book about local legends and rites.
Ah, you see where we’re going? Susan, finding the book while Linda is at a shoot in Bali, finds a rite to make her the ultimate seductress with power over men. This involves lighting candles in front of a mirror, which becomes a gateway to our old friend, the Evil Queen, who agrees to give Susan this power if she’ll supply her with blood.
That’s our setup. Susan keeps going out on the town in Linda’s most fetching outfits, finding horny men, and exsanguinating them in various nasty and cost-effective ways (Prouty’s work was apparently limited to the finger and half-corpse props, both of which are pretty cool). Eventually Linda comes back home and finds out what’s going on, and there’s a bizarre showdown with the mirror, with burning books, pixie dust and visible wires, all leading up to the biggest WTF ending since The Gates of Hell.
This was Indonesia’s last attempt to break into international film markets by aping western movies, a strategy that almost succeeded with Lady Terminator, which was by the same director, H. Thut Dilal (not to mention a movie that ends in similar delirium, Mystics in Bali). There are no fewer than three American actresses featured, and a whole bunch of Anglo actors to get sliced and diced. Sadly, it’s doomed to failure because it’s a half-hour of berserk horror movie supplemented by an hour of music videos as Linda models and Susan dances her way into her victims’ groins. Luckily, Msses Anin and Lawson are lovely to look at, so it’s not a complete waste of time.
Except we’re here for a horror movie. Well, I’ve seen worse. Hell, I started the evening with worse.
No trailer to speak of, so what the hell:
drfreex.com 