There’s a long tradition of horror movies claiming to adapt Edgar Allan Poe stories while really only taking inspiration from those stories’ titles, from the Lugosi-Karloff classics The Black Cat & The Raven to David DeCoteau’s softcore beefcake take on The Pit and the Pendulum. For as long as horror cinema has existed as a medium, Poe’s name has been exploited for easy marketing appeal, due to its synonymous association with Gothic tales of “the macabre.” What makes the 1965 Italo schlock Bloody Pit of Horror stand out in that tradition is that it dares to imagine a world where rather than claiming to adapt Poe without any meaningful connection to his work, horror movies do the same to Marquis de Sade instead. I suppose that’s because de Sade’s name is synonymous with kinky smut the same way Poe’s is with Gothic literature. By slapping de Sade’s name onto Bloody Pit of Horror, American distributors weren’t claiming to directly adapt 120 Days of Sodom or Justine; they were merely conveying a whiff of sadomasochistic sleaze for those interested in watching buxom models get tortured in bikinis. They did, however, slap a direct quote from de Sade into the opening credits, citing him as saying “My vengeance needs blood!” Unsurprisingly, that quote only triggers results for Bloody Pit of Horror when you google it, either because the filmmakers completely made it up, or because de Sade’s smuttier material is what’s more typically associated with his name.
Bloody Pit of Horror is a low-budget haunted castle movie in which a small crew of horror-marketing advertisers are location scouting for a series of photographs meant to illustrate horror novels, mostly posing hot young women in old, rusty torture devices. There is some metatextual humor to that premise, given that the movie itself is just an excuse to pose the same images, but any semblance of purpose or subtext stops there. Mostly, the models & camera crew explore the castle’s crypts & hallways to low-energy lounge music, in no particular rush to do anything in particular between photoshoots. Their lackadaisical workday is violently interrupted by the resident castle freak, of course, who believes himself to be possessed by the restless spirit of a red-hooded vigilante brute known as The Crimson Executioner, dead for centuries before their arrival. In truth, he’s a former colleague – a professional muscle man who’s been driven mad by professional & romantic rejections to the point of an incel killing spree. From there, it’s a beefcake vs. cheesecake showdown, with the masked madman strapping the models into ancient, complex torture devices so they can sensually writhe in bondage before ritualistic death. Iron maidens, body stretchers, pulleyed-spikes, boobytrapped bondage ropes attached to loaded crossbows: he’s got an entire toy chest full of naughty lethal weapons, and he’s not afraid to bare his naked, oiled-up chest while operating them.
On the 1960s Italo horror spectrum, Bloody Pit of Horror falls somewhere between the literary Gothic staging of Black Sunday and the shameless porno-mag erotica of The Vampire and The Ballerina without ever matching the heights of either work. The villain’s insane, confessional rants in the third act are far enough over the top to make it worthwhile for schlock junkies, though, especially if you have an appetite for vintage nudie-cutie kitsch. Here’s where I’ll confess that I saw a censored, low-res American edit of the film on used DVD instead of tracking down a pristine, untouched copy of the original Italian cut. I am apparently so adverse to sitting through ads on Tubi that I’m willing to watch an ancient thrift store DVD where the VHS tracking of the tape it was copied from is more visible in-frame than the cheesecake models’ naked breasts. I’m ultimately glad I saw the slightly shortened American edit, though, since the Italian version did not include the unearned allusions to Marquis de Sade in the credits and on the poster. That was an American marketing invention meant to signal exactly what flavor of smut was being sold (slightly non-vanilla), which I’ll confess still worked on me six decades later when I plucked it out of a Minneapolis record store bin. I can’t say that Poe’s name on the front cover would’ve sold me on it in the same way, but that’s likely because his name’s too ubiquitous in the genre to maintain any novelty.
-Brandon Ledet