Baker Antonio (Jonathan Fuller, ARCADE) and his wife Maria (Rona Di Ricci, THE PENITENT) head to the city center to peddle their wares despite her misgivings about the Inquisition's public displays of the punishment of heretics. They witness in horror the whipping and subsequent burning of a suspected witch (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, DOLLS). When the witch's son is also whipped, Maria tries to intervene and finds herself accused of witchcraft by the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada (Lance Henriksen, PUMPKINHEAD). Unable to admit his lust for Maria, Torquemada tortures her in an attempt to get a confession out of her that she has bewitched him. While Antonio tries to infiltrate the castle's dungeon to rescue Maria, her cellmate Esmeralda - a real white witch - (Frances Bay, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS) teaches her to withstand her torments and harness her own latent powers; however, Antonio is captured and Torquemada aims to torture him to get Maria to confess.

Although made on a low budget, Stuart Gordon's THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM benefits from its authentic castle location (the Castello di Giove in Italy, which served as the backdrop for a number of Charles Band's Italian productions) and the contributions of its seasoned Italian technicians including production designer Giovanni Natalucci (who designed several of producer Charles Band's Empire Pictures productions including Gordon's FROM BEYOND and DOLLS), costume designer Michela Gisotti, and cinematographer Adolfo Bartoli (who had worked under Pasquelino De Santis on Visconti's last two films). Make-up effects artist Greg Cannom - who also worked on Full Moon's MERIDIAN and SUBSPECIES - was a year away from his Oscar-winning work on BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA. Cannom's effects here are grisly, but this really is not a gore showpiece (he got to show off more with the prosthetics in the other two Full Moon films). Fuller (who would later play the titular role of Gordon's CASTLE FREAK) and De Ricci make sympathetic leads, and Henriksen - not yet a tiring DTV staple - reins in his lead performance (and lets Oliver Reed go appropriately over-the-top as a soused Catholic Cardinal in a welcome guest appearance). The supporting bits by Jeffrey Combs (star of Gordon's RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND) and Stephen Lee (who co-starred in DOLLS) are symptomatic of the film's uneven application of black humor; although Bay manages to hit both comic and dramatic notes admirably. Richard Band, another Stuart Gordon regular, provides a majestic orchestral score (with the by-now de rigeur OMEN-esque Latin "Satani" vocals).