EQUINOX redux...

Rating: 10/10 (15 January 2002)

EQUINOX (1971) is a creepy, almost documentary-like low budget fright film that begins with four college kids going out into the mountains for a picnic. They stumble across an imploded cabin (the home of a professor, played by the late fantasist Fritz Leiber) and find a book whose pages are made of human skin. If our intrepid quartet can't keep the book from falling into the wrong hands, there'll be, well, Hell to pay...

EQUINOX appears to have inspired Sam Raimi's fright-fest, THE EVIL DEAD: the parallels are, uh, Legion... But, whereas EQUINOX (available for years on video tape under the oddball title, THE BEAST) features towering, ape-like split-screen creatures, stop-motion animation, and forced perspective shots of ancient castles and the like, THE EVIL DEAD relies primarily on some extremely effective makeup fx. THE EVIL DEAD is intense, and there certainly are some shocking scenes, but the series began to slide into self-parody with the second installment (which I liked, nonetheless), and finally into outright cornball slapstick humor of the Three Stooges variety. It's a shame Raimi didn't stay the course: there are few enough "legit" fright films as it is; by opting for the dim-witted kiddie crowd, Raimi denies us a series that might well have rivalled George Romero's Living Dead trilogy in terms of sheer terror.