Surely it’s only in horror movies that people go out to the deep, dark woods to deal with their personal problems. Because sitting in a coffee shop, or at home, and talking it out with a loved one would be too normal. Too safe. But that’s one conceit of Pitfall, and plenty of movies like it. The great unknown is preferred to what is already known. Unfortunately for Pitfall, it comes in a long line of similar stories. Only now there’s the addition of what I call “trauma-stacking”; what makes it stand out is also what drags it down into the mud.
In just the first ten or so minutes, James Kondelik‘s movie drops multiple personal traumas. And that’s before we ever get to the current story (or trauma). I asked myself, why can’t the present-day events ever suffice in newer horror? Is a killer hunting two couples down in the forest just too simple and old-fashioned to be considered enjoyable again? Do the characters have to be working through it, prior to their peril, for the audience to feel genuinely invested? Obviously horror has been doing this formula for decades, yet somehow Pitfall and the like are all thumbs about the execution. It’s no less on-the-nose than The Descent was; however, Kondelik perhaps does too much, and not enough, with the traumas on display.
The two grief-stricken siblings at the heart of the story, along with their respective significant others and the group’s fifth wheel, are thinly conceived. Expect a lot of scowling, brow-furrowing and bursts of anger. No amount of blaring hurt and heartache can make them feel real. The antagonist is also uninteresting, and it’s only once his body count grows does he register as part of the story. Cursory character writing is indeed par for the course in these sorts of slashers, but why must everyone be so extra and unsociable? Harder to believe than a masked killer is the idea that these people would want to spend extended amounts of time with one another.
Luckily, Pitfall isn’t a complete waste of a walk in the woods. The carnage compensates, if not becomes a little redundant, for just about everything else in the movie. The booby traps do a lot of damage to the characters, but they save us from complete boredom. Otherwise, you would really have to watch someone be trapped in a spike pit, and be subjected to their constant hallucinations. Entertaining, they are not.
At the very least, Pitfall is a decently made movie. It being set in the woods, there is that valid fear of not being able to see jack because cinema nowadays largely does lighting and darkness in post. Refreshingly, Kondelik makes all the forest-set mayhem quite visible, even as the story plunges into night. There’s never a real complaint about the production values.
Pitfall isn’t the worst of its kind, but the script could have certainly been pared down to its most basic parts. A little less is more, I’ve often believed.
Pitfall is now playing in select theaters.
Tales from the Paulside 
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