PIN (1988) spoilers*
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Pin
H̶̛͖̜̽ë̵̘̯̻̔̽̓͒y̶̘̗͖̜̓͒̾̃ ̶̣̓̑͊̃̕S̷̢͈͔̖͍͆͑̈͠ȁ̴̗͍ — 3 months ago(December 03, 2025 07:50 PM)
Pin caught my attention when it first arrived on VHS at a local video store, but for some reason it was never one of the many horror movies that I rented from that store. It's always stuck in my mind as a movie to see, it just took me over twenty years to do so.
The story begins with a doctor who has a life-size transparent man dummy in his office, and he uses ventriloquism to have it interact with young patients, pretending to have the dummy - called Pin - help him make diagnoses. He has Pin interact with his own two children as well, even having him teach them important life lessons, and the kids are convinced that Pin a real, living person. The doctor's son Leon especially believes in Pin and trusts him. Pin is wise. He loves Pin. Even as he ages into adulthood, he apparently never learns about ventriloquism and the knucklehead continues to believe that Pin is real.
At one point, Leon witnesses his father's nurse using the anatomically correct Pin as a sex toy, giving him severe sexual hang ups on top of the rest of his nuttiness. He catches his sister Ursula with a boy and makes her promise never to have sex again… Though it's a bit too late, as the girl finds that she's pregnant. Her father performs the abortion.
Finally realizing that Leon is off when he catches him talking to Pin in the office one night (the boy is now Norman Bates psycho enough to provide the voice himself while still thinking that it's the dummy talking), the doctor puts Pin in the car and, with his wife riding shotgun, heads off to donate Pin to a medical school. A car accident kills the doctor and his wife on the way and Leon gets Pin back, moving him into the family home with him and Ursula.
From there it's a story of further descent into madness and dummy idolatry as Leon continues to talk to Pin and Ursula has to deal with living with her crazy, overprotective brother. She knows her brother's crazy, but she can't see him put away in a mental institution…
The acting is good, the adult Leon and Ursula are well-played by David Hewlett and Cyndy Preston, and the always great Terry O'Quinn plays their unpleasant doctor father. It's a very strange, creepy film, with some unsettling, disturbing moments. It disturbed me watching it now, I image it really would've messed with me in '88/'89. And I have to give an honorable mention to the awesome slow motion moment near the end.