Equinox

The beginning of cabin-in-the-woods horror, sort of

Four college-aged youths go out to the woods north of Los Angeles to visit their professor’s cabin and have a picnic, but they stumble upon a grimoire and several malevolent creatures are inadvertently unleashed.

“Equinox” mixes “Mysterious Island” (1961) with HP Lovecraft and the low-budget weirdness of, say, The Twilight Zone. It was originally made as “The Equinox... A Journey Into the Supernatural,” a 71-minute flick made for $6500 by Dennis Muren and Mark Thomas McGee in 1967. However, after impressing a producer, a director was hired to shoot additional footage (11-12 minutes) and expand it into a more acceptable feature film with a shortened title. This took a couple of years and explains the 1970 release date. The director enlisted was Jack Woods, who happens to play the weirdo ranger.

The colorful special effects in the third act are surprisingly good, all things considered, with the stop-motion stuff reminiscent of “Planet of the Dinosaurs” (1977). Perhaps the best effect is a green giant impressively executed via forced perspective.

While the professor’s cabin is barely a factor, this was the precursor to the cabin-in-the-woods trope, along with the contemporaneous “Night of the Living Dead.” It can be traced back earlier, if you consider flicks like “The Killer Shrews” from 1959.

The exploration of good and evil is interesting and the flick obviously influenced Raimi’s first two “Evil Dead” pictures from the 80s. Unfortunately, there’s too much marking time in the midsection and, except for the ranger, the principal actors are dull with the two females being bland and unmemorable. One of the young guys, by the way, is Frank Bonner, who went on to play Herb Tarlek on WKRP.

It runs 1 hour, 22 minutes, and was principally shot in areas north of Hollywood, such as Tujunga Canyon, Bronson Caves in Griffith Park and La Cañada-Flintridge.

GRADE: C