“Whoa, watch where you’re throwing that damn thing, Scott!”
When folks of a certain age hear the title Pitfall, it may conjure memories of the classic Atari game of the same name, an adventurous 8-bit run through the jungle, running on crocodile heads, and avoiding those dreaded titular traps. You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that anyone involved in the production of the 2026 survival horror flick Pitfall have any clue about the light and breezy adventures of Pitfall Harry because this is neither of those things.
In fact, to borrow the film’s title as metaphor, the pit that Pitfall falls into is the one that made it think that it had to have “something to say” in terms of social commentary. What should be a down and dirty slasher movie in the woods (not even the jungle) is instead burdened by multiple characters dealing with major trauma that just has no place in this kind of movie. Not every horror movie has to impart a lesson or serve as commentary on something, and it only rings more hollow here in that Pitfall seems to take gleeful delight in its violence and gore. It violates that most sacred of unwritten rules in genre filmmaking: know your lane and stay in it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with attempting to punch above your weight class, so to speak, but director James Kondelik and screenwriter Victor Rose can’t seem to figure out what kind of a movie they wanted to make in the first place. The film opens with an origin story for the film’s villain, known simply as The Hunter, and played as an adult by former MMA fighter Randy Couture. Seeing his mother murdered in front of his eyes as a small child unlocks something primal in him, carrying on his father’s tradition of creating deep pit traps in the woods to capture unsuspecting trespassers.
We are then introduced to siblings Scott (Marshall Williams) and Ashley, played by Alexandra Essoe, an actress I interviewed over a decade ago for my day job who is a delight and especially good in a criminally under-seen movie titled Starry Eyes. Several years earlier, the siblings lost their parents, and flashbacks that are doled out throughout the movie slowly reveal their shared trauma over the event. Now Scott, Ashley, and their significant others are off to hike the same trail they planned to hike with their parents years earlier when tragedy struck. Naturally, their path will put them on a collision course with the Hunter and his various traps.
Also along for the ride is the moody comic relief in the form of Scott’s friend Lars, played by Richard Harmon. I know the timing doesn’t exactly line up, but it really feels like the writer and director went to see last summer’s absolute blast of fun that was Final Destination Bloodlines, because they seem to have asked him to play the exact same character in this movie. When Scott falls into a pit, he must battle against time and the demons of his past to get himself out and back to his family.
I was shocked to see that director Kondelik edited the film himself, because the action set-pieces are over-cut to death. For example, a fight scene in the film’s climax becomes desperately difficult to keep track of because both characters are wearing hoodies. It’s disappointing because he builds suspense well through stillness in other parts of the film, namely a scene where two characters think someone’s outside their tent. Other times, the shot sequencing will be so frantic that it’s twice as shocking when the camera then lingers on a really gory pay-off. Had you told me the film was taken away from its director and cobbled together from a bunch of unfinished sequences, I’d be inclined to believe you.
Had Pitfall stayed in its lane, devoted itself more fully to the gore and less to ham-fisted characters wrestling with generational trauma, and shaved maybe 20 minutes off its runtime, you might really have something. Or they could have made the generational trauma movie with less lovingly shot gore that actually makes an effort to tie the Hunter’s trauma more directly to Scott and Ashley’s trauma. Right now, however, the movie just kinda wants to have the glory of both of those films without ever fully committing to making just one of them. I will also add that the actors—in particular Essoe and Williams—do a good job of selling what’s being asked of them, they just deserve a movie that would’ve dug a little deeper into those themes.
Ultimately, Pitfall ends up feeling like someone threw Friday the 13th, First Blood, The Descent, 127 Hours, and Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies into a blender and called it a day. Nothing that made those films effective is interrogated, it just kinda wants to coast off whatever residual goodwill audiences have toward those movies. I would’ve rather it coasted off the goodwill I have toward the original Atari game, that could’ve been a really fun movie.