The Equinox... a journey into the supernatural (1967) - #338

OK, let's go. Go!

I'll get straight to the point. The only reason that just about anyone would legitimately have to watch The Equinox... a journey into the supernatural is to hear a few old friends reminisce about the good times they had and the clever improvisations they used to fulfill their high school horror geek ambitions and make their own movie in the mid-1960s. And to do that, you have to watch it with the commentary track set to ON. Otherwise, if viewed with anything resembling an attitude of critical discernment, this film is a cringe-inducing mess most of the time, with a few occasional flourishes of charming, crudely rendered special effects that put the most charitable among us in a disposition to give a free pass to the wooden acting, the utter hokum of the story line and the indisputable cheapness of the entire affair. It's the kind of film that seems ripe for exploitation by the likes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or RiffTrax, but due to its distinguished lineage and (perhaps more conclusively) its admission into the Criterion Collection, the film has thus far eluded such an ignominious fate.

That distinguished lineage I mentioned is attributable to the name of Dennis Muren, winner of nine Academy Awards for his contributions to numerous science fiction and fantasy films such as Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Muren was a teenager when he conceived, directed and designed the special effects for The Equinox... a journey into the supernatural over the course of a couple of summers in 1965 and 1966. The post-production work is responsible for the films 1967 "release date," even though aside from a few private screenings for friends and family at the time, it was never publicly shown or distributed. The goal of Muren and his collaborators David Allen and Jim Danforth was to produce a finished film that could be shopped around for broadcast on local TV stations, but even more fundamentally, to just put on their resume as something they achieved on a very low budget with the most basic levels of technical and professional support. Just kids at the time, this crew had no formal training on how to make a movie, so there's a lot of figuring it out as they go on display here, including some candidly acknowledged filler scenes that were inserted after they had filmed all the scripted action and discovered they they were about 15-20 minutes short of their goal of creating a truly feature length film. As it is, this one only clocks in at 71 minutes, which would be just about perfect for the late night monster movies, once another 19 minutes of commercial breaks were added in to round out the hour-and-a-half time slot.

As for the narrative, it's the most ludicrous mash-up of scary movie tropes one could imagine, but perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the times. It's told in flashback form, based on the recorded account of a mental patient who's interviewed a year and a day after he'd been picked up unconscious after being hit by a car. His tale involves himself and a few friends, a double-date foursome of attractive middle-class SoCal teens who set out on an afternoon outing to look for a school teacher who had strangely disappeared without any explanation. The missing teacher was an old man who lived in a mountain cabin. When they arrive, they find that the cabin has been destroyed, but they don't know why. (We do, because we saw an incongruously situated squid monster tear it up with its writhing tentacles, never to be seen again.)

But a mysterious castle appears on the ledge of a cliff just above them, luring them into further explorations. As their journey progresses, they're drawn into a cave from which emanate disturbing howls of laughter and agony. There they meet an cackling old man who eventually gives them a strange book of forbidden lore.

That eldritch volume, which contains arcane text, symbols and diagrams describing a weird inter-dimensional portal, draws the attention of various beasts and demons that assault the young people as they try to retrieve the book, the secrets of which are too dark and horrible to describe, utterly unfit for human perusal.

Chases and pyrotechnics ensue, resulting in the death of all but one of the unfortunate teens, that lone survivor now being confined to a mental institution where he lives in fear that he himself will die exactly one year and a day from that fateful encounter. And of course, that day is the day we're observing, as we watch the poor fellow recoiling in fear, depending on the security provided by a tiny crucifix on a flimsy little chain. The film finishes up with an ineptly executed twist ending that feels exactly like an absurd knock-off of The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone.

Really, it's all so much inconsequential juvenile phantasmagoria as far as cinema is concerned, but this film does offer a glimpse of the raw material that went into the making of Equinox, the more widely distributed final product that was released in 1970. Jack Harris, producer of The Blob, bought the rights to what turned out to be a demo reel and added another 15 minutes or so of footage to get it ready for the drive-in movie circuit. This version is more or less a reconstruction of the original film that Muren and his friends created in his back yard and a few other public spaces in the foothills of southern California. We can see some drastic changes in image quality in a few scenes that were presumably deleted from the final version and thus never preserved with as much care what made it into the main feature. I doubt that I'll see much improvement in regard to the story-telling when I get to Equinox proper on this blog, but when that day comes, I'll probably have more to say about the significance of the film's themes and its commentary on popular culture. For now, this is just a relic and a fond remembrance of a time when a group of kids could get their hands on a cheap hand-wound 16 mm Bolex movie camera and pursue their dreams of paying tribute to special effects wizards like Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien, whose stop motion animation techniques had created such indelible impressions in films like King Kong, Mighty Joe Young and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Given their youth, their naivete and their passionate zeal in seeing this project through to completion, I have no hesitation in forgiving the inherent flaws and nonsense of the film itself.

Next: Uncle Yanco