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think
it should be a law - or at least a sacred tradition - that every actor should
have, as their first credit, some crappy, tawdry little embarrassment of a movie
that they will never admit to on their resume, until some wiseass talk show host
drags out a clip from it and ambushes them with it. You know, like Roy Scheider
in Curse
of the Living Corpse. Jennifer Aniston in Leprechaun. Tom Hanks
in He Knows You're Alone. Demi Moore in Parasite. Kevin Costner in
The Postman (wait, that wasn't a first flick....). Well, Equinox
is Frank Bonner's skeleton in the closet.
ow,
some of you may be thinking, Who? Frank what? Admittedly, mentioning his
name after such high-powered
box-office bigwigs might lead to a "does not compute"
message; most of you will know him as the unctuous sales manager Herb Tarlek in
the sublime WKRP in Cincinnati. Though not one of the brightest-burning
luminaries in the stellar scene, he is nonetheless a solid performer; and
besides, relative anonymity has never been a reason for us to spare
anyone humiliation, has it?
e begin
the movie in media res (as smug writer folk with a liberal arts degree
like to say) with a fiery explosion and our hero, Dave (Edward Connell) hitting
the ground, then calling for "Susan". A glimpse of bloodied legs wearing
toreador pants leads us to believe that Susan is dead. Dave hears something like
the flapping of great wings, and runs away. He runs away for quite some time, in
fact. Then he finds a highway and attempts to flag down an approaching car.
Alas, the car has no driver and runs him over. The callous car would
probably turn around and finish the job, but another auto, this time occupied by
real people, comes upon him.
ow, let's skip to a year later, when a
wooden, badly-dubbed reporter arrives at a sanitarium to ask a wooden,
badly-dubbed doctor if he may interview the catatonic Dave for a follow-up
article (SLOW news day, eh?). Dave persists in staring at his one
possession, a small cross on a chain, until the reporter shows Dave an 8x10
glossy of an older man; at the sight of this, Dave becomes violent and attacks
the reporter.
hile Dave is being fitted for a straitjacket,
the doctor plays a tape recording of the interview with Dave, just after the
incident on the highway and before he became a mental case. Thus begins our
movie proper, which is one long flashback....
he older man in
the photo, Dr. Waterman (Fritz Leiber - yes, that Fritz Leiber), summons
Dave to his mountain retreat to discuss an important discovery with him.
Accompanying Dave on this idyllic picnic is his pal Jim (Frank Bonner, at last),
Jim's chick Vicki (Robin Christopher) and a blind date for Dave, Susan (Barbara
Hewitt). Our four young cannon fodder - er, friends - find the road impassable
by car, and proceed on foot to Waterman's cabin.
hat they find is not the good doctor,
but the wreckage of his cabin, and not from an explosion or somesuch - it's
caved in (not only that, but someone's turned it into an obvious
miniature!). They also find Park Ranger
Asmodeus*
(Jack Woods, the director), who assures them he hasn't seen Waterman, but surely
he's "back in town." As Vicki has wandered off from the rest, she sees a castle
on a nearby cliff. "Maybe Waterman went there!" deduces Dave, so they set off to
visit the castle. In passing, they hear insane laughter from a cave and find
huge, cloven footprints. Being idiots, they decide to go into the cave, where
they find a cackling Old Man who gives them "The Book", 
which is large, old, and covered with strange
symbols.
utside,
they force open the lock on The Book and find inside... notes by Waterman! The
Book is a veritable Bible of Evil, containing secrets of demonology over a
thousand years old (and the book, it should be noted, reeks of sulphur).
Waterman employed the Scientific Method on the rituals defined therein, and
summoned some beasties he found out he couldn't control (in a flashback inside a
flashback we see the cabin demolished by some evil squid-thingie). Fortunately,
The Book also has a helpful appendix of various holy symbols that will hold evil
beasties at bay. Only Susan is carrying a cross... the rest must make another
symbol out of willow branches.
he cross, in fact, saves Susan when Asmodeus
catches her alone (our four heroes split up more than an amoeba in heat). He
dons a really cumbersome-looking silver frog ring (?), which somehow hypnotizes
her, and tries to assault the blonde, only stopped by the sight of the crucifix.
Also, and here's something I didn't know, being evil causes you to smear
charcoal under your eyes and make really weird shapes with your mouth. Be sure
to watch out for these things in your day-to-day activities.
aterman himself turns up and tries to steal The
Book, but slips in a stream and hits his head. Then his dead body disappears.
Then Asmodeus crops up again, but David declines to tell him about Waterman's
death or the book. Jim is mystified.
nyway, it's
time for something to happen, so a big, animated, reptilian gorilla
appears at the cave and chases the Old Man around. The girls see the gorilla
catch up with him and kill him - the guys are out climbing around, trying to
find the Castle, which has mysteriously vanished - and everyone ends up trapped
in a small box canyon. The gorilla manages to drag out The Book by using a tree
branch as a tool, and while it is thus occupied, Dave kills it with an
improvised spear.
fter that, things just go to hell in a handcart. Susan loses
her cross and gets all possessed and dark-eyed, and attacks Vicki, who has also
managed to lose her protective symbol. Asmodeus tries to make a deal with
Jim. When that fails, he dispatches a 15 foot caveman (okay, it's probably
supposed to be an ogre) to get it, but it only succeeds in chasing Jim into an
Invisible Zone, which is where the disappearing castle resides. Dave goes in to
rescue Jim, and sends the girls off to the car with The Book.
ave finds
Jim, but fails to notice (it's probably the red-tinted light in the Zone) the
dark
smears under his friend's eyes. Yipes! It's Asmodeus in disguise! and he managed
to break Dave's symbol! Asmodeus turns into a winged-demony kind of thing and
swoops down on the girls, mangling Vicki. Susan manages to get back to Dave, and
the winged demony thing pursues them through the woods and into an abandoned
cemetery, where they are saved only by a tombstone in the shape of a cross. Not
for long, as Asmodeus causes the whole graveyard to explode, and an enormous
hooded figure assures David that "In one year and one day... you will die!" And
then we're back to the opening of the picture, with Susan's bloody legs,
running, running, running, driverless car, aieee, boom. Then the doctor
stops the tape.
ell, concludes the reporter, that was useless.
The doctor says, basically, dude, what did you expect? That was one year and
one day ago. The reporter helpfully re-emphasizes that it was one year and
one day ago, and oh, incidentally, somehow he wound up with David's cross. The
reporter leaves, passing in the parking lot none other than Susan, who looks at
the hospital and smiles as we hear Dave's drugged voice moan, "My cross...
where's my cross?" The end.
t's fairly common knowledge that Equinox
began as a student film, which puts it in the lofty company of flicks like John
Carpenter & Dan O'Bannon's Dark Star and George
Lucas' THX 1138. Producer Jack H. Harris had something of a track record
with these - he's the one who bankrolled Dark Star and John Landis'
Schlock (though I can't say for sure if Schlock started as a
student film). Unlike Carpenter and Landis, however, director Jack Woods only
went on to work on one more picture, writing Beware! The Blob (or Son
of Blob), also produced by Harris*. Another reason we know this to be a Jack H. Harris
picture is the final "The End" morphing into a big question mark.
he student film roots are fairly obvious from
time to time, with an abundance of ShakyCam™ work, and acting that ranges from
the merely adequate (the girls) to the rather wooden (Dave). Frank Bonner does
stand out as the sole likable character, the only one who might actually be
human in the whole mess.
hen again, it's tough to be hard on the actors when the
writing works so hard against them; as it is 1971, and Women's Lib has not made
too great an impression, the girls are constantly being left behind, because,
among other things, women apparently cannot climb steep hills. As the entire
movie is a flashback, how can Dave relate events for which he was not present?
The schizophrenic script also makes a point of showing the four heroes as being
resourceful and fairly clever, and then (of course) proceeds to make them act
like utter idiots.
et's
see, we've just encountered a twenty-foot gorilla lizard that wanted a Book
badly enough to kill the Old Man, and the notes of a dead college professor
assures us that The Book draws such evil things "like flies", so what do you do?
Of course. You hang around long enough to "do something" about the Old Man's
body, and you hang on to The Book like it holds a few million in T-bills. Oh,
and you split up while you're doing it, too. Morons.
he effects work, by our usual heroes, Dave
Allen, Jim Danforth, and Dennis Muren (who also has an associate producer
credit), are the best the production could afford, and it's a pity they couldn't
afford more - that evil squid thingie, in particular, could have used more
screen time. I remember, on my first viewing of this sometime in the late 70's,
I was disappointed that the ogre was done live-action, and was not animated like
the other creatures. But a more appreciative eye now discerns that it was
apparently achieved by some nicely-accomplished forced perspective shooting, and
therefore it looks a great deal more real than the animated footage, which as
usual shows a bit too much grain and soft focus on the real-life footage
combined with the models.
'd love to hear how fantasy writer Fritz Leiber
got involved in this glorious mess*.And mess it is, glorious or no; it is ambitious far
beyond its means, both budgetary and talent-wise. Nevertheless, the story is
quite interesting - Raimi's Evil Dead owes it at least a nod (and yes,
probably Forever
Evil, too). It has a number of interesting ideas going, unlike any
number of 
other horror films, which take one idea and beats it to
death (Hel-lo, Friday the 13ths), if they have an idea at all
(Hel-lo, any number of po-mo vampire flicks).
adly,
in the final analysis (which is what this last paragraph always is), the ideas
and several good effects are not enough to save Equinox; this is a film
you either love or hate, and I love it, for I have a soft spot in my heart for
hey-let's-put-on-a-show productions like this one, that possess at least a
modicum of brains and originality. But it's those technical shortcomings, the
camerawork, the acting, the writing, that drag this down from an average
movie to sub-average; I hoped that the ideas would outweigh the execution, but
as Monty Python would say, the Execution has put on weight.
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* Is it just that I'm jaded, or could they just as well have named him Park Ranger Lucifer or Park Ranger Old Scratch? Park Ranger Back.
* Who also, yes, acted as producer on the 1988 version of The Blob, which kicked considerably more posterior.
* Not to mention Ed Begley, Jr., credited as assistant camera. Back, I'm almost done.