Equinox, 1970
A man named David (Edward Connell) has been in a mental institution for a year, following the strange deaths of his friends. David's doctor plays a tape of an interview with David to a curious reporter, and the film almost entirely takes place within the story being told on the recording. In it, we learn that David, Jim (Frank Bonner), Susan (Barbara Hewitt), and Vicki (Robin Christopher) went on an ill-fated trip into the woods where they encountered a creepy ranger named Asmodeus (Jack Woods) and procured a book of possibly evil origin.
Maybe it's just that I was expecting this movie to be total junk, based on years of seeing certain images from it or hearing it get joked about, but I thought that this was not half bad! There are some . . . choices . . . that detract from the film, but overall I was surprised at how much it succeeded at generating some real suspense.
The main selling point of the film is the effects, a mix of stop-motion animation and forced perspective scenes. I really enjoyed these effects, as they had both an old-school charm and a weirdness to them that set them apart from other similar monster sequences. While the infamous beast on the film's cover gets most of the attention, I really liked the sequence above. I also liked some of the cuts, as when a flying demon tackles a person and then the edit cuts to him in human form.
In terms of what doesn't go as well, the characters are not developed in any meaningful way. For the most part I liked the character of Asmodeus (and his habit of suddenly appearing, on horseback, right in front of or behind the main characters). There is something off about him, and this works best when he is silently menacing. Later in the film when the acting is less, um, subtle, it trips over into something too silly for me.
Not a great film by any means, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. The ending is also a lot stronger and more menacing than I would have thought.