Film Review – Pitfall

For people of a certain age, the title “Pitfall” inspires memories of gaming days gone by. Of hours spent running through a digital jungle, swinging on vines and jumping on crocodile heads. Screenwriter Victor Rose doesn’t share that same nostalgia, instead making his version of “Pitfall” about a killer in the woods targeting campers who dare to enter his domain. It’s the usual in slasher cinema, but Rose doesn’t stop with obvious genre entanglements and sequences of survival. He’s pursuing a more sincere massacre, using the heaviness of grief and trauma to deal with characters and their personal problems between sequences of victims being hacked to pieces. Director James Kondelik does what he can to obscure his tiny budget and limited locations, and he delivers a reasonably effective nightmare in “Pitfall,” which carries a bit more substance while still pursuing frights. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com