Equinox (1970)

Good movie but grossly overrated

A lot of fun.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Please understand. When I give this only a 2/10, that really is a pretty accurate assessment of the quality of the movie in almost every respect. I'm not knocking the kids who made it. It was apparently done by a bunch of relatively inexperienced young people on a shoestring budget, and I respect the effort that was put into it - but the fact that somebody tried hard isn't going to make me pretend that this is anything but what it is - a really bad horror movie about four young people who on a hike through the woods discover a book about evil that eventually has them doing battle with the devil. The stop motion animation on the various creatures that appear can be forgiven - not only was this a shoestring budget, but it was also made in 1970. The field of special effects was still developing, and the creatures were quite fine. It was more the acting and the dialogue than any of the technical aspects that dragged this down. The dialogue between the characters didn't seem natural. More than anything, it sounded dubbed (even though this was obviously done in English) - almost as if the movie had been filmed and then the dialogue was redone later. Maybe that was typical of very low budget movies in the era? I'm not sure about that but I found it very distracting, because the dialogue wasn't always in sync with the mouths of the actors - even though even a cursory bit of lip reading confirms that the actors were saying the words we were hearing.Really this is most interesting for some of the names that are associated with it. One of the four young people (Jim) is played by Frank Bonner, who would go on to much greater fame some years later as Herb Tarlek on the TV show "WKRP in Cincinnati." I also did a double take when, glancing at the credits as they rolled at the start of the movie, I noticed that the assistant camera man was Ed Begley, Jr! Also, Dennis Muren (uncredited as one of the directors) went on to do some visual effects work on some pretty big movies, including several of the Star Wars episodes and Battlestar Galactica. So there was obviously some talent (or at least some potential talent) involved with this which makes it worth watching as a curiosity, but little more. (2/10)

"Equinox" is a low-budget and wholly independent precursor of Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead" about a group of teenagers,who accidentally unleash supernatural forces after reading passages from a mysterious book Necronomicon found in the woods.The main difference between "Equinox" and "The Evil Dead" is that the latter is drenched with gore and violence,whilst"Equinox" plays more like 50's creature feature combined with cheesy stop-motion monster roaming the woods.I must say that the stop motion monster effects are pretty impressive as are the split screen effects.The acting is amateurish and the writing leaves a lot to be desired.Who would of ever guessed that Park Ranger Asmodeus would turn out to be Satan incarnate.Still strong 8 out of 10.

This movie could almost be considered a best-of compilation of previously-discovered visual effects, cult film conceits, and camp. The story itself is reminiscent of old movies from Attack of the Gila Monster to Haxan, the imagery covers the world from Godzilla and King Kong to Vertigo, the themes include creepy castles, desert wastelands, and Satanism, and the characters run from one situation to another with careless abandon as they commentate on the very things that are happening to them with a weirdly analytical mindset. The movie precedes the career of its visual effects creator (who went on to work on Star Wars and Jurassic Park, to lend Equinox some credibility) and its plot foretells the later Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 of Sam Raimi. That said, it's not all that interesting.Basically, a group of four kids go out to visit a professor friend of theirs, only to meet with horrors involving a Satanic book, a creepy park ranger, a kooky old geezer, and spectacular (and mostly claymation) monsters. By today's standards, it's a pretty slow movie as it pretty much doesn't mind taking the time to let the camera linger on the special effects or, worse, on the dialog. There's an interesting sub-theme about religious symbols as a sort of metaphysical chemistry, and for what it's worth the characters are a lot more aware and intelligent than most horror film fodder. Unfortunately, that only gets the movie so far, as its creativity still serves a ridiculous premise that is, to most b-horror film buffs, all too familiar. In that way, it really is like listening to a best-of CD of a certain era or sensibility: you've heard it all too often before and the real joys are more often on the lesser known works.--PolarisDiB

"Equinox" is so exquisitely crap-tacular, I have to give it such a high rating. This film really enters the heights that "Plan 9 from Outer Space" rules, and possibly surpasses that legendary Ed Wood opus. It doesn't just fail magnificently, but does so in SO many ways.Where else will you find such deliciously bad dialog, very poorly looped (I'm sure more than half of the dialog was looped - where the dialog wasn't able to be recorded live and had to be dubbed in later, not always by the same person), the worst stop-motion animation on film (was it Claymation?!), stock background music thoroughly misused for their scenes (although the opening theme is way cool), and the most amazing eyebrows ever created for a movie (at least I hope they were fake, for the sake of the writer/director/star - we're talking Brezhnev with eyebrow mousse here).AND it features a young Herb Tarlek! But "Equinox" does deserve its props. Sam Raimi pretty much lifted the plot for "Evil Dead" from this movie. (To much better effect, of course, but still...) And writer/director/star Jack Woods comes up with some clever solutions to shooting difficult scenes. For one scene, where the cast is running through some spooky old caverns, Woods must have thought: "How can we film that? No way can I shoot in the caverns, it'd be impossible to get the light right." Woods solution: show a pitch black picture, with the occasional torch moving across it. Brilliant! There's also a bit where the two male leads have to climb up a steep, almost vertical hill, in order to look for an invisible castle. (Don't ask.) Hey, your boy Herb Tarlek is a manly man, but he ain't climbin' no rock face for you, Jackie boy.So... he has them stoop over on a horizontal section of a trail, and turns the camera so that it looks like they're climbing a steep hill! (I half expected to see Adam West and Burt Ward to pop their heads out of gopher holes.) There were so many times I laughed out loud while viewing "Equinox" that I absolutely recommend it to discernible viewers of unique film landmarks.As Leonard Pinth-Garnell would say, "Awful! Awful! Truly bad! Really bit the BIG one!!"