Equinox (1970)

the audience applauded

Really Surprised!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

EquinoxIf you ever get lost in the woods simply start a fire so the water bombers can find you.However, the hikers in this horror movie will need more than controlled burn to defeat these demons.While looking for a missing scientist in the woods a group of friends meet a hermit in a cave who gives them a book containing ancient secrets on the occult. Asmodeus (Jack Woods), the king of demons, wants to get his talons on the tome so he sends an array of colossal monsters to obtain it. With cameos from sci-fi's biggest names - Forrest J Ackerman, Fritz Leiber – this Indy from 1970 does amazing things on a shoestring budget - specifically the stop-motion simian creature - and has gone on to inspire countless filmmakers.Furthermore, it's nice to finally find a discarded book in the wild that wasn't written by a reality TV personality.Yellow Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

This has to be the worst movie I have ever seen, and I have very little sense when it comes to watching dreck; I'll watch almost anything. This is just laughably bad. It's difficult to think of the following as "spoilers," since if you honestly care what happens in this movie, I pity you. The list of bad details is long, but I'll try to keep it as short as possible, to spare you. Let's see. The weak premise is that there's a book of evil witchcraftery the Devil wants back, and some cackling old coot has been hiding this book in a cave; meanwhile, the Devil has done everything he can to get it back, including hanging around the cave, waiting for the old coot to come out. But the old coot hides, until David, his Beautiful Blond Girlfriend, her cute blonde sidekick/BFF, and a dark-haired sneering guy, go into the hills on a picnic, only to find the old coot in the cave, who gives them the book. From there on in, all Hell breaks loose, literally, as the Devil tries to get his book back. There's a pagan ring the Devil (in the guise of a park ranger, astride a beautiful, sensitive, caring-looking horse, who deserved better than to have to be in this mess) puts on right before he attempts to rape the Beautiful Tall Thin 1970s Blonde. He wouldn't bother raping the short, fat blonde, of course, since that's not how beauty works. Beauty exists to attract the Devil, who leers at the Beautiful Blonde a lot, but ignores the other blonde. I'm sorry, Other Blonde, but that's what happens to short, chubbier girls in bad movies; you get to play the other available stereotype, the plucky asexual sidekick. Then the Devil leers at each of the four friends at least once during the course of the movie, because that's something we expect from the Devil: leering. You can prevent the Devil from leering at you, though, if you wear a pagan cross-like symbol, which has the power to avert evil for a time. But careful, because if the Devil leers at you for too long, you will be turned into one of his minions! Then you will hit your friends in the face. You can avert evil even longer if you're carrying this teeny tiny golden cross, because that has amazing abilities, small as it is, to look very large on camera when needed. "We'll be all right!" one of the characters says at one point. "We've got the cross!" If only the cross were sufficient to save them.... poor souls. Then there are the claymation figures, one of which is pretty cool cause it's a flying red devil with claws and wings, but come on, it's claymation. Okay, I know I'm just jaded, but ... claymation looks so damned awful it's not even funny. Only Ray Harryhausen could carry it off. This stuff looks like someone's kid brother did it. David survives, just barely, and ends up in a mental institution, and it's supposed to be eerie, I guess, that his girlfriend, who you thought was dead, isn't, and returns at the end with a sneer on her face, obviously possessed by the Devil. I guess she's coming to get the book, which someone has at this point, but I'm not sure who.

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!!"