"Of course, running throughout the film is the Inquisition's sickly preoccupation with the ‘perils of the flesh'; although the majority of the torture scenes are quite bloodless, this obsession with carnality as something corrupting and malign lends the film and script an unseemly feel. It's always there, finally coming to the fore in the film's conclusion, but colouring word and deed throughout [..] Although The Pit and the Pendulum has an escalating pace and even odd moments of humour which makes it feel a long way away in tone from a period Gothic like, for instance, The Monk (2011), it does have substance and much to recommend it, aesthetically, stylistically and in its imaginative development of a classic horror short story (not forgetting Richard Band's sweeping movie soundtrack)." - Keri O'Shea, Brutal as Hell