If you follow the film industry as much as I do, then you'll know how often directors clash with studio executives when determining the final cuts of big-budget films. Such conflicts between the artists who create the art and the people who fund the art and mistakenly think that they are artists too have resulted in a long, long list of expensive failures. (Alien 3 (1992) and The Invasion (2007) immediately comes to mind.) Of course, it continues to happen--so much so with Hollywood productions that it's almost inevitable at this point--but how would you feel if the same thing happened with the theatrical release of a low-budget, fan-made film?
Such was the case with Equinox. It began as an amateur horror fan film made in 1967 (its original title: The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural), and then it was re-edited, partially re-shot and distributed theatrically by Tonylyn Productions in 1970. For a long time, the Tonylyn version of Equinox was the only version that was available to the public; when Criterion released their two-disc set of Equinox back in 2006, they included both the original 1967 cut with the theatrical cut on the same disc (both with commentaries) for direct comparison. While neither cut are examples of horror filmmaking at its finest, the differences between the original edit and theatrical edit are astonishing and reflect how much the fans got right--fans who meticulously studied the craftsmanship that went into their favorite movies--and how much the so-called professionals got wrong.
Read on for my complete comparison of the two versions of Equinox, and how no movie is too small for creative differences between creators and producers.
In both edits, Equinox is about a group of college students who travel to the cabin owned by college professor, Dr. Arthur Waterman (Fritz Leiber Jr.), to check up on him because of his recent absence from their campus. They arrive to find that the cabin has been torn apart and Waterman is missing. Their search for the professor leads them to a mysterious text called the Book of the Damned that is filled with ancient inscriptions and spells intended to open a portal to a demonic parallel world--a portal that Waterman has already opened....
What Equinox is widely known for is that it features the early work of three special effects artists who would later work on some of the most popular films of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. These artists were Dennis Muren (Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, A.I., War of the Worlds), Dave Allen (The Howling, Willow, Ghostbusters II, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Arrival) and Jim Danforth (Clash of the Titans, Creepshow, The Thing, The Neverending Story, Day of the Dead, Prince of Darkness). Muren produced the film for only $6500 and he co-directed the original cut of Equinox with Mark Thomas McGee, who also wrote the film's script. Muren and Allen worked on the stop motion effects, while Danforth provided the cel animation and matte paintings.
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A forced perspective shot from Equinox.
Essentially, Equinox is a demo reel for the early effects work of Muren, Allen and Danforth; that the demo reel also happens to have an intriguing and creative story--albeit a poorly acted, poorly scripted and somewhat disjointed story--is simply a bonus. Considering that the film was shot on a tiny budget with amateur talents, the end results are very impressive.
Many aspects of Equinox echo the influence that the horror and sci-fi fan culture of the early-to-mid 20th century had on budding young filmmakers; depending on how you look at it, Equinox is a love letter of sorts to the creature features of that era. Muren and Allen were devoted fans of pioneering stop motion animators Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, and several of the effects scenes in Equinox are clearly influenced by O'Brien and Harryhausen movies such as Mighty Joe Young and It Came from Beneath the Sea.
Forrest J. Ackerman makes an uncredited cameo in Equinox by lending his voice to an audio recording that plays early in the film (he also provided a video introduction for the Criterion Equinox set). Ackerman's contributions to the horror and science fiction genres were numerous, and his biggest legacy to the fans of those genres was a magazine he published called Famous Monsters of Filmland. Famous Monsters differed from other entertainment magazines of its time by focusing on the artistry that's performed behind the scenes, such as special effects and creature costume designs. Muren and his production crew must've been devoted acolytes of Ackerman's magazine and the movies it covered, because their love of classic creature features and the techniques that brought them to cinematic life is on display in each frame of their original cut of Equinox. Such open affection provides a sort of charm that offsets some of the amateur film's more uneven aspects.
The theatrical release poster for Equinox.
Dennis Muren and Mark Thomas McGee
were not credited on this poster.
All I can figure is that Woods thought that Equinox would be his big break as a writer and director (hint: it wasn't), so he tried to put as much of his stamp on it as possible. It should also be noted here that the theatrical version of Equinox lists Woods as director and co-writer, while Muren's credit went from being the co-director and producer to just associate producer. Woods even put himself in front of the camera as a new character named Asmodeus, a demon who assumes the guise of a park ranger and exerts his sinister influence over young ladies by making funny faces at them before feeling them up (no, I'm not kidding). Considering that Harris made a name for himself by producing The Blob in 1958 for only $120,000, it's a shame that he was willing to let Woods run roughshod over the work that was so passionately and cost-effectively made by Muren and his crew.
Asmodeus (Jack Woods), as he grimaces, puckers, clenches
and frowns his way into the soul of an innocent victim.
The way I see it, Equinox and The Evil Dead are low-budget bookends of sorts to the changes that horror cinema went through during the 70s. Equinox reflects the heavy influence of O'Brien, Harryhausen and Ackerman on one generation of horror film fans, whereas The Evil Dead reflects the heavy influence of George Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven on a later generation of horror film fans.
Because Equinox at its best is a cheap fan-made film, your interest in seeing it will greatly depend on how much you would like to see this kind of film from another time in film history. In other words, you don't watch Equinox to see a classic horror film; instead, you watch it to see an example of how fans from a particular era applied what they learned about the crafts practiced by their movie idols to a film they financed and produced on their own, and how that film was later changed for the worse by someone else for theatrical release.
I've seen plenty of movies that were released on DVD and Blu-ray as both a theatrical cut and a director's cut, but this is the first and only time I've seen this situation occur with a fan film. For that reason alone, I highly recommend Criterion's release of Equinox for anyone who is interested in horror and sci-fi fan culture. You should also try to see Criterion's Equinox if you believe that modern CGI-based special effects lack the creativity and finesse of older special effects techniques such as matte paintings, forced perspective and stop motion animation. Click here to read Glenn Erickson's review at DVD Talk of both discs that are in Criterion's set; however, if you are interested in seeing both versions of Equinox but have no interested in buying it, the first disc of the Criterion release is available for rental through Netflix.
In 1985, Equinox was distributed on VHS by
Wizard Video under the title The Beast.
in 3D, and James Cameron will do the same for 
. With that in mind, here is a chronological list of films that, if possible, I would like to see converted into high-quality 3D movies. Read on...
and/or 
)
(1954)
, but it's the only film in the Creature trilogy that's not in 3D. Converting this movie to 3D--as well as converting its two predecessors from anaglyph 3D to a modern 3D format--would make for a great 3D Creature triple feature and/or a fantastic 3D Blu-ray box set.
(1982)
and 
(1984 and 1990)
), re-releasing his Gremlins movies in 3D would be one way to compensate for such an egregious injustice.
(1984)
(1987)
(1988)
(1990)
(2002-2007)
movies, 
, or the short-lived 
.
(2004)
movie was re-released in 3D, it proved that 2D stop-motion animation could be successfully converted to 3D. Thus, why not perform 3D conversions for the work done by one of the most influential stop-motion pioneers, Ray Harryhausen? 
, 
, 
, 
... the list goes on and on of works that he created that are excellent candidates for conversion to 3D.
comic book miniseries worked well because both franchises dealt with killer extraterrestrials, so it didn't require much narrative acrobatics to explain what these two monsters were doing together in the same story. (In contrast, one of the more frustrating aspects of the 
movie was the "ancient astronaut" subplot that took up so much time but didn't add much to the story, except to provide a convoluted excuse as to why the movie takes place in the arctic.) The same applies to 
: Both franchises revolve around technology that has run amok, so it doesn't take much effort to put them together in the same setting. On the other hand, when two franchises that have nothing in common are forced together into the same story, 
. Nightmare Warriors is billed as third part of the Freddy vs. Jason "trilogy", with the first two parts being the Freddy vs. Jason
movie and the 
comic book miniseries. Read on for my review of Nightmare Warriors, which includes a brief look back at its two predecessors.
movies to the mix. A treatment for Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash was drafted, but never produced. So while a sequel to Freddy vs. Jason remains unmade, Wildstorm and Dynamite Entertainment later contacted Jeff Katz, the author of the Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash treatment, to work with James Kuhoric to rework the treatment into a six-issue comic book miniseries.
), which is how Freddy learns about the cursed book. It's also fun to see Ash's car again, his seemingly indestructible 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale--it's the same car that makes 
comic book series (say, Freddy vs. Jason vs. Hack/Slash) than with a crossover that involves Evil Dead.
) who has a seething grudge against both Freddy and Ash for what they did to her boy in the previous two chapters--imagine the kind of awesome bloodbath that would have been!