Survival Gets Ugly Fast

Read Time:5 Minute, 43 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Pitfall
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Genre: Horror, Thriller
Year Released: 2025, 2026
Runtime: 1h 48m
Director(s): James Kondelik
Writer(s): James Kondelik, Victor Rose
Cast: Marshall Williams, Alexandra Essoe, Richard Harmon, Jordan Claire Robbins, Randy Couture
Where to Watch: coming to AMC theaters across the USA on May 29, 2026

RAVING REVIEW: PITFALL wastes very little time making its intentions clear. Within the opening stretch, James Kondelik’s survival slasher establishes the woods as a place where nature itself already feels hostile long before the actual killer enters the picture. Animals die suddenly. The environment feels damp, unstable, and isolating. Characters move through the forest like they’re stepping deeper into something that stopped being safe years ago. By the time the film drops its character into the trap, the movie has already built an atmosphere that feels grimy, anxious, and mean in all the right ways. What’s interesting is that PITFALL doesn’t operate like a traditional slasher despite carrying a lot of that DNA.

The setup absolutely sounds familiar on paper. A group of friends heads into the wilderness for a camping trip; their emotional baggage follows them into the woods, and a figure begins picking them off one by one. That framework is there, but the film leans surprisingly hard into survival horror once Scott, played by Marshall Williams, becomes trapped after being impaled through the leg by a massive spike. From that point forward, PITFALL becomes less about escaping one killer and more about enduring a situation that feels impossible to survive.

That shift gives the film a different kind of tension than most slashers. Instead of relying purely on stalking sequences and kill reveals, Kondelik spends large portions of the runtime forcing audiences to sit with Scott’s pain, exhaustion, dehydration, and panic. The pit itself becomes its own form of horror. Every movement looks agonizing. Every failed attempt to escape feels worse than the last. The film understands that physical vulnerability can sometimes be more unnerving than the killer standing above it all.

Marshall Williams handles that material well because he never turns Scott into an invincible action hero. There’s frustration, fear, bitterness, and desperation layered into the performance. The movie allows him to look weak when the situation demands it, which helps ground the survival elements even as the slasher elements escalate into something more heightened.

Alexandra Essoe also brings emotional depth to the film as Ashley, Scott’s estranged sister. Their shared trauma involving the death of their parents becomes one of the movie’s main emotional themes, and while the script occasionally pushes those themes a little too aggressively, both actors sell the relationship enough to keep it functional. There’s believable resentment between them, but also the sense that both characters are exhausted from carrying unresolved grief for too long.

Richard Harmon becomes the film’s pressure valve. His performance injects humor into scenes that could’ve easily become oppressively grim without completely undermining the tone. The film’s dialogue works best when it lets the characters sound like real people reacting under stress, rather than constantly delivering dramatic exposition.

Once Randy Couture’s hunter enters the film, PITFALL starts embracing its slasher identity. Couture makes for an effective antagonist largely because the movie doesn’t overcomplicate him. He’s less a psychologically intricate villain and more a force of violence stomping through the woods with terrifying physical presence. The character carries echoes of old-school slasher icons, especially the unstoppable brutality associated with Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. Still, Couture’s size and performance keep him from feeling like a mere imitation. The kills themselves are where the film really starts having fun.

PITFALL clearly loves practical gore effects, and most of them land with a satisfying brutality. Arrows, blunt-force trauma, spike traps, throat slashes, fire, the movie constantly looks for ways to make injuries feel ugly and painful rather than slick or sanitized. Even when the film occasionally leans into exaggerated slasher logic, the violence still carries enough physicality to feel impactful.

There’s also a noticeable appreciation for environmental horror woven throughout the movie. Rain, mud, darkness, fire, wolves, isolation, everything feels like part of the threat rather than simply part of the world. The forest itself starts feeling predatory. That atmosphere gives PITFALL a stronger identity than many interchangeable woodland slashers. Kondelik repeatedly frames characters as tiny in the face of the overwhelming environment around them, reinforcing the sense that survival here depends more on endurance than heroism. What ultimately sticks with you isn’t just the violence, though there’s plenty of it. It’s the exhaustion.

The film never feels embarrassed to be a horror movie. It embraces gore, tension, practical effects, wilderness paranoia, and emotionally damaged characters without constantly stopping to explain itself. There’s confidence in how it handles atmosphere. Even when parts of the narrative struggle a bit, the filmmaking itself keeps pulling things forward. PITFALL understands that survival horror works best when audiences feel physically drained alongside the characters. By the end, everyone looks battered emotionally and physically, and the film lets that ugliness remain visible rather than magically resetting everyone into clean final-girl heroics. The result is a horror film that may not reinvent either the slasher or survival genres, but knows how to merge them into something tense, brutal, and consistently engaging. It stumbles occasionally under the weight of its larger emotional ambitions. When PITFALL locks into pure suspense and desperation, it becomes hard not to get pulled down into the mud with it.

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