Blog on the Lillypad
Friday, March 19, 2004
 | Anybody Remember Equinox?
Solstice is today. The sun ticks over into Aries, and a new year has begun. Brings to mind a film that I suppose is horribly bad by any adult standard but which, when I was a kid, both fascinated and terrified me. It's an old BW B-flick about four college students hiking through the woods to find a college teacher who has invited them up for the day to discuss his latest research. The story is a series of the unexpected: a monster or two even before they get to where they are going, a madman who gives them a heavy, leather-bound book, and the wreckage of what is left of the college professor's cabin. |
Somewhere in the first hour of the flick the four college kids try to figure it all out and look into the book, which is a sort of multi-cultural compendium of every symbolic defense known to man against evil. So the kids decide to make little crosses and stars of David for themselves out of twigs to carry as protection. Fat lot of good it does them. [On top of everything else, bad theology has ruined many a fine picnic.] But the concept that caught my attention as a child was that they realize that their late college professor has unleashed dark forces onto the earth to the point that now the good and the evil are in exactly equal parts (hence the title, "Equinox").
A truly spooky forest ranger comes onto the scene and tries to hypnotize one of the girls and then attacks her. Later, he tries to bargain with one of the guys for the book and offers him anything he wants for it, but the kid declines because he wants to understand the book. The spooky ranger declares that none of them will survive for longer than one year and one day. And then monstrous creatures destroy three of the four. The fourth kid, the lead guy, goes insane and the last scene is of him in a straight jacket, and the undead version of one of the girls is walking into the insane asylum to finish up the job.
The movie is so lame in many respects that I won't pan it here. It has some strengths. First, it was the student project of Dennis Muren, and he tooled it mostly as a vehicle to get some good special effects into it. The story is really built around the monsters. Later, when a producer reworked it to bring it to theatrical release, some scenes were re-shot, but the monster footage stayed in. The monster scenes look like Harryhausen to the lay viewer, but they are the work of Jim Danforth, who was already well known in FX circles at the time and has continued to work with top Holly wood films (as has Muren, whose first love is special effects).
But without doubt the better known Blair Witch Project owes a lot to this movie. In spite of bad acting, a laborious start, and some confusion in the plot, the film generates a genuine creepiness and edginess. The woods are a primitive place, and strongly suggest that the earth itself is a battle ground between good and evil, where in dark corners untouched by man, the mysterious and unknown still wield power. It's almost like Hansel and Gretel in that sense, or Little Red Riding Hood: Dark Woods and strange creatures that will destroy us. The four students enter a forest from which escape is impossible, except at the forest ranger's decree. And even then, it's only for insanity and death.
 | As a young person, I would watch Equinox every time one of our UHF channels in the Philadelphia area ran it. To me, the team of young people fighting evil by every device they could think of was appealing. And my greatest complaint of the film was that the good guys lost. I'm sure if I went back to it now, I would see how stupid the film really is, so that's why I'm not going to watch it again. It intrigued me and probably has a lot to do with my grasp of storytelling and my use of two devices in many stories: "The Happy Team" as a collective protagonist; and a tightly woven chain of unexpected events (or events exactly opposite of reader expectations) to form the plot. |
Another element that I like about the film is what one reviewer called its "Hey let's put on a show!" format. It's a quality shared with Doctor Who, in which the film makers decide that if you have some good ideas and a pocketful of cash with a few free Saturdays, you ought to try to string the ideas together and make a story out of them. From the beginning, both producer and viewer accept that things will go wrong in the effects, acting, possbily even the plot, but you're looking for concepts and scenes that are intriguing. There's an optimistic expectancy that anything might pop up in a story, so let's get the story rolling and see what we get. As a professional film, Equinox has little merit. As a student project, it shows promise of genius to come and raises suggestions for macabre and frightening story ideas that Blair Witch Project and even Evil Dead used with greater success. (Evil Dead, by the way, is not a movie I would recommend, but it is more well known than Equinox and undoubtedly its step child.)
For a less affectionate review, Click here.
For a sort-of affectionarte review, Click Here
