The Dead Pit

The Dead Pit (1989) is an American horror film you can watch online on iFILM. Two decades ago, Dr. Ramzi ran butcher-shop experiments on the patients of a psychiatric hospital, until a colleague shot him and sealed the body — lab and all — behind a wall in an abandoned wing.

Now a young woman named Jane arrives: not insane, just stripped of her memory. Her presence seems to crack the seal. The basement stirs, Ramzi claws his way out of the grave, and he picks up right where he left off — favorite instruments in hand and a horde of reanimated patients behind him. Jane's nightmares turn out to be no delusion but buried memory of what happened here, and the one thing that might tell her how to put the butcher back down.

This was the directing debut of Brett Leonard, who'd later make The Lawnmower Man, with western veteran Jeremy Slate as the old priest. It's a cheap, gory, gleefully unhinged slice of late-'80s horror that climaxes drenched in neon-green light — exactly the kind of thing a VHS-shelf gorehound lives for. Stream The Dead Pit (1989) online on iFILM.