Pitfall at Panic Fest, 12 April 2026
“Family is forever,” says the patriarch Drew Williams (Grant Vlahovic) near the beginning of Pitfall. Drew is driving back through thick mist from a camping trip he has just taken with his wife of decades Loraine (Teresa Laverty) and their adult children Scott (Marshall Williams) and Ashley (Alex Essoe), and he is giving fatherly advice to Scott who is contemplating his next steps with girlfriend Gwen (Jordan Claire Robbins). Yet despite Drew’s words, the Williams family is about to be torn apart by a horrific accident that will leave two of them dead, and the other two deeply damaged – and whose harrowing details will only be gradually revealed in a cumulative series of flashbacks as the film goes on. For what happened in these woods then, and the events that will follow, are presented in painful parallel as twinned family ordeal.
In fact Pitfall is a tale of two families. For it opens with two separate primal scenes – not just the violent incident on the road which traumatised Ashley and Scott, but a scene of an abusive father vindictively slitting the throat of his fugitive wife in front of their young son in these same woods, and dumping both in a pitfall full of wooden stakes. These separate sylvan calamities will eventually come together in the same place, as a serial killer (Randy Couture) will treat anyone who intrudes upon his forest terrain as the most dangerous game. Using arrows, axe, knife and elaborate crippling traps rather than guns like a primeval predator, he will toy with, trap and take down his prey – but he is also, in these sadistic hunts, working through the issues that haunt him, much as the Williams siblings are.
Five years after losing their parents, the estranged Ashley and Scott return to that remote woodland, hoping to reconcile themselves both with each other and with the tragedy from which neither has fully recovered. Together with them for the camping trip are their long-term friend and all-round city boy Lars (Richard Harmon) – who is complaining about the hike even before it starts – as well as Scott’s girlfriend Gwen and Ashley’s boyfriend Charlie (Matt Hamilton).
When Scott takes an accidental falls into a concealed pit and finds himself pinned to the spot by a stake through the leg, in his struggle to survive he is not just battling hunger, thirst, pain and the elements, but also his own conflicted self (presented literally as a doubt-inducing double). Ashley has her own dilemma, having to decide whether to keep the baby that she secretly carries in her belly, and as she negotiates her complicated emotions about maternity and her late, loved mother, this crux is only amplified and intensified by the life-or-death scenarios which the hunter imposes. Meanwhile even the hunter himself, in ruthlessly killing so many people, is attempting to process confused feelings of anger and loss that connect intimately to his own family.
“Is anyone else getting a Deliverance vibe out here?” Lars will ask of their backwoods environs, expressly namechecking John Boorman’s 1972 outdoors survival thriller. It is not the only intertext here: for a specific line (“I hope you rot down there!”) will also be quoted from the unhinged cabin-in-the-woods horror of Evil Dead II (1987) at the point when Scott, much like Bruce Campbell‘s Ash in Sam Raimi’s film, is locked in hallucinatory combat with himself. And while Pitfall brings plenty of visceral thrills to its cat and mouse, it also comes with consistent psychological underpinnings, and an unexpected sympathy for all sides in the bloody chase. Think of James Kondelik’s ‘family film’, co-written with Victor Rose, as a scenic melodrama, with graphic maulings and murder, as all these characters become trapped together and confronted with the raw, wild reality of who they are, what they want and what they are capable of doing.
strap: A sylvan tale of two families: James Kondelik’s survival slasher makes damaged siblings the most dangerous game of an equally damaged hunter
© Anton Bitel
