jamesraeburn2003 A safe designer called Richard Logan (William Franklyn) awakes on a bomb site in Wapping High Street after being coshed by a gang of thugs. However, he finds that as a result of his head injury he has lost his memory and has no recollection of what has happened to him over the past three weeks. In addition, the PI hired by his wife, Julie (Moira Redmond), to find him has been found murdered and Logan has his business card in his pocket. Could he have been the killer? It transpires that a safe, which his firm designed for the owners, has been broken open and the contents stolen. It seems that he was abducted by a criminal gang and forced to break open the safe and with the aid of his wife sets out to unravel the mystery. But the gang lead by Clifton Conrad (Leonard Sachs), who owns a seedy club in Soho is intent on murdering him before he regains his memory and exposes them...An efficient b-pic thriller from quota quickie specialists, Butcher's Film Distributors, which is briskly directed by Lance Comfort and provides enough intrigue to keep the punters entertained for the first half of the double bill. The main drawback is Comfort's own script (adapted from the novel To Dusty Death by Hugh McCutcheon), which at times borders on the absurd. But the director makes best possible use of what obviously was a shoe string budget and the proceedings have a nice feeling for the place (London and the Home Counties) and period which are much enhanced by the atmospheric lighting of veteran cameraman Basil Emmott. The film's other weak aspect is the irritating slushy pop ballad, My Heart Is The Lover, sung by one Ronnie Hall which keeps reoccurring throughout the movie as it is used as a plot device - the hero keeps on hearing it in his head but he can't think where he could have heard it as it was only recently released while he was missing. Needless to say it provides him with a vital clue later as to the gang's whereabouts. The vocalist Hall appears in a nightclub scene and trivia buffs should note that the backing band is no other than The Dave Clark Five who were shortly to become international pop stars. Pit Of Darkness also has a better cast than one would expect of a British B including William Franklyn, Moira Redmond, Nigel Green and a young Anthony Booth best known as Alf Garnett's son-in-law Till Death Us Do Part.

dbborroughs Man awakes up bruised and unsteady in a ditch. Seeing the time he hurries home where he apologizes to his wife for being three hours late. What he doesn't realize is that he's actually three weeks late and his wife has been worried sick. Over the next couple of days he attempts to piece together what happened to him and in the process finds he's being followed by strange men. Good solid B film works thanks to its plot being far from typical and a game cast that manages to sell the slightly contrived bits of the tale. It's the sort of film that's perfect for a rainy Sunday or a Saturday curled up on the couch watching mysteries until the wee hours.

heedarmy Thanks to a reasonably interesting story and strong cast, this is one of the better films from ultra low budget Butcher's Films. The paucity of resources does show up a little however in the rushed climax - presumably there wasn't enough money to stage a big action scene. Casting cognoscenti will appreciate the fact that two of the villains are played by "The Good Old Days" impresario Leonard Sachs and the Prime Minister's father-in-law, Tony Booth!

Alice Liddel The title sounds like a Hammer cast-off, but the film is in actual fact a low-budget thriller about a safe-designer who wakes up dazed in Wapping, found by a young urchin, having been roughed up by some hoods. He goes home to his worried wife and finds he's lost three weeks of memory. The evidence suggests he's been having an affair with a woman named Mavis (only in England!), and killed the private investigator his wife sent to find him, although he claims not to know either. Soon he is being followed by some mysterious men in a grey Mercedes, and lured to a country house with a bomb in it. His efforts to retrieve his memory, and the possibly criminal events he has taken part in, are complicated by the possibility that he's going mad.The story of a man who wakes up in a strange place unable to account for a period of time is familiar enough - from Hitchcock's 'Spellbound' to the recent 'Memento'; it has even been treated comically in Launder and Gilliat's 'A Constant Husband'. It was also a feature of some of the more daring British TV programmes of the 60s, including 'The Avengers' and 'The Prisoner'. In some ways, 'Pit of Darkness' feels like an early TV programme, with its short length, its low-budget, one-take genre aesthetic, and the groovy John Barry/Laurie Anderson music that punctuates occasionally.Lance Comfort was a prolific producer of these kinds of film throughout his career, and is today, despite a recent monograph, a neglected, even despised figure. His work is accused of a lack of imagination, poor execution, shoddy construction. His films are shown quite frequently late at night on British TV, but invariably any TV guide will give them the lowest rating, dismiss them as beneath contempt or 'sleazy', an example of an underside of British film production that would give birth to soft porn in the 1970s and video nasties in the 80s.I am not for one minute suggesting that 'Pit' is any masterpiece, but I will claim that it is clearly superior to films like 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' and 'A Kind of Loving', or anything from the Free Cinema/New Wave/social-realism being touted in the Britain of the period. Its script (also by Comfort) is intelligent and often inspired. the amnesia plot gives an added dimension to any mystery, for two reasons: the hero must become a detective and may be the criminal; the clues and spaces he investigates are also a topography of his own mind, an indication of its fragility, raising the possibility that it might never be known. Logan's interruption of three weeks is profoundly disruptive, not only to his own identity, but also his marriage, and the retrieval of one is intimately linked to the other - he can only begin solving his personal mystery after he's convinced his wife.But does he solve his own mystery? The filming rarely matches the quality of the screenplay, but there are some excellent sequences, the best being Logan's return home from nearly being bombed (an eerie crime-in-the-country set-piece that would be exploited in 'The Avengers' and Hammer horror); the dreamlike tone carries over, the profound alienation of a man exploring his own home; he hears his wife talking, and the scene becomes fragmented, broken voices and sounds assailing him, a possible flashback, an insane vision, the realisation that his wife is involved, we don't know, but the dream/mystery filming (repetition of events, uncanny silences and emptiness) is closer to Resnais that British quota quickies.Throughout the inchoate repetition of a pop record he's never heard haunts him, and signals mental breakdown of some sort. When he begins to piece everything together, the process is preceded by one of these cues: it is significant that his solution is plausible only in terms of his own flawed conclusions, and could be coloured by his own fears and prejudices (his resentment at Ted for taking away a secretary it's implied he's been seeing etc.). The effect is bravely ambivalent.Further, the date on which Logan wakes is September 13. He's been missing three weeks, and twice he's told something he's aware of (the record, his wife's play) only came into existence ten days ago. That's September 3, the date World War Two started. He's found in a Blitzed bomb site, and his friend and partner compares his amnesia to one he received as an airman during the war. Is Comfort's modest psychological thriller really a film about Britain and its memory of the war? The fact that he's given us a film so rich in ambiguity suggests critics shouldn't be so quick to dismiss him.