I have no idea what mania exists within Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, but that's where this movie comes from and man, you know how people say that movies feel like transmissions from another dimension? They only think they know what they're talking about and really wish that they had seen this movie.

Everybody in town hates Jamie Benjamin. The kids in school, other kids who don't go to school with him, eben old ladies, everyone he meets either makes fun of him or abuses him. His only friend is Teddy, his stuffed bear, which may be sort of strange, as he's twelve. And yeah, he's starting to get into girls thanks to puberty, including his babysitter, who he soon takes to show one more secret.

You see, Jamie has a pit in the woods filled with Trogs that he feeds with raw meat. Teddy suggests feeding everyone who treats him badly to these monsters and Jamie agrees, but then Sandy gets knocked into the pit and gets devoured. A bitter Jamie allows the Trogs to escape and they attack the town before a militia kills them and he's sent to live with his grandparents.

Is puberty a pit filled with hairy beasts that love to destroy human beings? This film believes that. It's also a movie that has no interest in the thing you call real life. I mean, the original script definitely felt that way, as the Trogs were only in the mind of Jamie and not real.

This is the only movie Lew Lehman ever directed. He did write several films - Phobia - and for the Police Surgeon series, a TV show he also was worked on as the music supervisor. His wife wouldn't allow him to shoot the nude scenes, so the story goes that the screenwriter shot them instead. The only shot involving nudity that Lehman was allowed to film was the skinny dipping scene and only because the actress was his daughter Jennifer, adding one more bit of weirdness to an odd movie.

Here's a particularly weird, warped and flat-out unsettling little low-budget killer kid horror favorite. This truly strange offering centers on 12-year-old oddball Jamie, a friendless, sexually precocious and socially maladjusted pre-pubescent teen creep whose sole pal is a teddy bear with glowing red eyes that occasionally talks to him. Jamie's heretofore lousy lot in life perks up considerably when two good things go his way: his parents hire a sexy young lady (nicely played by brunette hottie Jeannie Ellis) to look after him and, better still, Jamie discovers a deep hole in the nearby woods with a bunch of big, hairy, carnivorous prehistoric humanoid beasts he dubs "trogalogs" residing in it. Pretty soon Jamie is not only spying on his babysitter in the shower, but also feeding various folks who mercilessly persecute him and/or put a crimp in his lifestyle -- his babysitter's football player boyfriend, the mean schoolyard bully and his equally nasty girlfriend, even some cranky old biddy in a wheelchair who lives down the street -- to his newfound butt-ugly, fanged and hirsute flesh-eating monster buddies.

Director Lew Lehman really plays up the intrinsic perversity of the alarmingly aberrant premise; he has the evil little brat "hero" cut out nude photos from a book and force the uptight, yet attractive local librarian to secretly strip for him in front of an open window (!). Lehman's aided substantially in his goal to present Jamie as one deliciously deviant and depraved puppy by the strikingly obnoxious performance by homely and charmless child actor Sammy Snyders: With his stringy build, bumpy nose, grating raspy voice and unsightly salad bowl haircut, Snyders qualifies as one of the most grotesquely off-kilter and unsympathetic murderous little twerps you will ever see in a fright flick. The movie has a very cool surprise ending, too. The Anchor Bay DVD offers this demented dilly on a two-sided flipper disc with the hilariously horrendous late 80's direct-to-video clunker "Hellgate;" it's a satisfyingly clean and crisp widescreen presentation with a skimpy still and poster gallery as the only extra.

The Pit is a strange but oddly watchable '80s horror film -- so bonkers it's hard not to like. The story centres around 12-year-old misfit Jamie (Sammy Snyders of Huckleberry Finn and His Friends fame) who is left in the care of babysitter/home help Sandy (Jeannie Elias) while his parents are away. Jamie's bizarre behaviour gives Sandy cause for concern - he talks to his teddy bear, keeps nudie magazines under his pillow, cuts out pictures of naked women from library books, sneaks into her room while she is asleep (nipples out!),gets her to wash his back in the bath, and declares his love for her by writing a message on the bathroom mirror while she is taking a shower. He also tells Sandy his secret: he has found a pit in the woods that is home to trolls (or 'trollologs' as he calls them). Of course, Sandy doesn't believe this outlandish story, at least until she consents to join Jamie on a trip to the pit...

Man, the tone of this film is all over the place: sometimes jokey, sometimes genuinely disturbing (Jamie's phone call to sexy librarian Marg Livingstone, played by Laura Hollingsworth),sometimes inexplicable (Teddy moves by himself),and sometimes gory (the trolls eating their victims). Just when you think you have it sussed, it changes course. I was 100% convinced that the more fantastical elements -- Jamie's conversations with Teddy and his meetings with the trolls -- were all part of his disturbed imagination, and that when we see Jamie feeding people to the creatures by luring them into the pit, he was in fact killing them himself. That would have made sense (and was apparently the writer's original intent). Instead, the furry, yellow-eyed, meat-eating critters turn out to be all too real, and, aided by Jamie, escape their pit to go on the rampage. Cue a fun-filled final act as a team of hunters pursue the trolls to their hole in the ground and blast them to bits with shotguns (rationalising what they have seen by calling them wild dogs!).

And just when you thought it couldn't get any more crazy, there's a twist ending that is positively insane (and is a strong indication that director Lew Lehman had his tongue firmly in cheek throughout).

The thing is, as totally haphazard and oddball as the film is, it's certainly never dull: the characters are fun, the performances are solid (Snyders carries most of the film and is suitably weird throughout),and Lehman's direction is competent (I'm surprised to see that it is his only credit as director). The film delivers a couple of surprises along the way (with one particularly unexpected death) and a touch of exploitative content for good measure (topless nudity from Elias, Hollingsworth and the director's daughter Jennifer as a skinny dipping teen who is carried away by a troll). Perhaps most importantly, it is unequivocally unique: it's the only film I can think of where a blind woman in an electric wheelchair is dumped into a pit of cannibalistic trolls.