Every January, Spectacle Theater allows its volunteers and members to vote on their favorite programming from the previous calendar year and decide which films deserve an encore run at the hallowed Brooklyn microcinema. This year’s top audience pick is the 1988 Canadian cult classic Pin: A Plastic Nightmare, a massively underrated psychological thriller/gothic family tragedy.
Terry O’Quinn plays Dr. Linden, a successful family practitioner. He and his wife raise their two children, Leon and Ursula, with austerity and discipline. Despite his profession, Dr. Linden is only comfortable teaching his kids about the human body via Pin, a life-size, anatomically correct medical dummy that lives in his office. Ursula is amused by Pin, having caught on that it’s her father’s ventriloquism that makes Pin talk. The more naïve and closed off Leon, however, believes Pin is real, and begins to confide in him regularly, unbeknownst to the rest of the family. One day, while hiding in the doctor’s office, Leon witnesses his father’s nurse use Pin for sexual gratification, a sight that traumatizes Leon and crystallizes a disturbing psychosexual identity crisis in him. By the time the siblings are on the cusp of adulthood, Ursula, pushing back against the stifling environment her family created, is ready to grow up and break free, while Leon has only grown increasingly disturbed. Wanting to care for his sister, while disgusted by her burgeoning sexuality, Leon becomes more and more entwined with Pin. And it seems like the doll has a mind, and a voice, of its own.
At first glance, Pin appears to be a killer-doll movie, but it has more in common with Magic (1978) than Puppet Master (1989). The director and screenwriter Sandor Stern (the screenwriter of The Amityville Horror) adapted the film from a novel by Andrew Neiderman, who went on to become V. C. Andrews’s official ghostwriter after the famed author’s death in 1986. The classic V. C. Andrews themes of generational secrets, transgressive sexuality, and gothic melodrama sit alongside the horror elements in Pin. At the heart of its story is deep sadness and the tragic realization that Leon and Ursula are probably too damaged by their upbringing to help one another heal.
Pin screens tonight, January 10, and throughout the month, at Spectacle Theater, as part “Best of Spectacle 2023.”
