"If Pit and the Pendulum doesn't manage to be quite as impressively atmospheric as its predecessor, it's perhaps because the original story doesn't have the same sense of universal corrosion as Poe's work - and this is maybe for the best, given that Poe's sense of a rotten world came from a rather dark place in his brain, and it speaks well of Matheson and Corman that they weren't able to attain the same sense of hopelessness. Still, Pit and the Pendulum captures exactly its predecessor's greatest achievement: it is every bit a B-movie, with all the directness and lack of pretense that implies, and yet it is treated with absolute care and gravity by people anxious to do right by Poe's incontestably sincere approach to his tales of the weird and uncanny." - Tim Brayton, Antagony & Ecstasy