It would be churlish to be too hard on Equinox though it’s really not a great film at all. It was essentially an amateur film that hit the big(ish) time when it was picked up for theatrical distribution by Jack H. Harris, who arranged for new material to be shot and had the original film – directed by Jack Woods, Mark Thomas McGee and future visual effects giant Dennis Muren – re-edited. A shorter, slightly better version was rediscovered years later and the entire project was a labour of love for all involved – and it shows. Equinox may be crude and have moments that drag but you can’t deny the enthusiasm and passion with which it was made.

The film opens with some of the footage newly shot by director/actor Jack Woods for Harris, as a newspaper reporter (Jim Philips) turns up at a psychiatric hospital to investigate the deaths of three young people in the woods a year earlier. He finds the only survivor friends, David (Edward Connell) catatonic, but tape recordings of the police interviews conducted at the time fill in the story. David, Susan (Barbara Hewitt), Jim (Frank Boers Jr) and his girlfriend Vicki (Robin Christopher) are scouring the backwoods in search of the missing Dr Watermann, a researcher into the paranormal. In a cave, they meet crazy old man who gives them an ancient book, “a veritable bible of evil,” that Watermann supposedly used to summon demons. Watermann appears and steals the book and when David and Jim give chase, he’s killed in an accident. Soon after the group ore being menaced by a sinister forest ranger, Asmodeous (Jack Woods), a huge ape-like creature, a green-skinned giant and a red-skinned flying demon that turns out to be Asmodeus in his true form.

Equinox, by any usual critical standard, is pretty poor. The animation – some of it done by a young David Allen and the already professional Jim Danforth – is highly variable, the performances stiff and unconvincing and the storyline, particularly in this version, all over the place. But it has an indefinable “something” – maybe the slightly otherworldly 16mm photography (the woods and forests of America rarely looked as sinister as they did in low-budget 60s and 70s exploitation cinema), or the charming crudity of those effects. Whatever it is, it causes you to root for Equinox as the cinematic underdog it is even you know it’s not very good.

Originally shot over a lengthy period of time under the title The Equinox… A Journey into the Supernatural (the film-makers supposedly met each other through the small ads in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine), Equinox underwent quite a transformation in the hands of Woods and Harris. The full-length film bears little resemblance to the original despite using much of its footage (some animation was cut out of the longer version), its storyline diverting considerably from the one we became used to in the expanded version. There’s no Asmodeus in the original, for example, so we’re spared Jack Woods’ terrible performance and his grotesque gurning and drooling as he attempts to force his attentions on a strangely compliant Susan.

Not that the rest of the cast acquit themselves terribly well though of course most were non-actors just having a good time making a movie. Horror and science fiction novelist Fritz Lieber was roped in to play the wild-eyed Dr Watermann though he proves to be a man of few words, and Frank Boers Jr later changed his name to Frank Bonner and forged himself a career in television, perhaps most notably appearing as Herb Tarlek in the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-1982) and its sequel New WKRP in Cincinnati (1991-1993).

Technically the film is a mixed bag. Some of the animation is effective, some of it less so. The giant ape-like creature changes size from shot-to-shot (the animators hadn’t quite got the hang of this scale malarkey just yet) and is ridiculously easily disposed of (“find a long stick”), and the green giant with more on his mind than selling tinned vegetables looks better in stills than it does in motion. There are other problems too. The mis-matched film stocks are clearly evident at times, a hair in the camera gate and some compositing artefacts are frequent companions, and the score is an overly insistent collection of dramatic library cues.

So Equinox has more ideas than budget but there are still some good moments along the way – the ominous fluttering of leathery wings in the early scenes as something huge and unseen flies over the heads of the youngsters; a huge cloaked figure that materialises at the climax to curse David; the Lovecraftian tentacled monster that wrecks Watermann’s cabin in flashback; or the creepy scenes of cowled occultists prowling around a blood red landscape before pitching themselves in a seemingly bottomless pit. It’s an ambitious and sometimes inventive film, clearly the work of mostly inexperienced filmmakers whose real talents would later be revealed in areas not related to writing and directing.

It’s certainly unlike any other film of its time and although there had been actual adaptations of the work of H.P. Lovecraft before (Die, Monster Die! (1967), The Shuttered Room (1967)) it deserves a little credit for capture something of the spirit of the writer far more effectively. The film has often been suggested as a source of inspiration for the team behind The Evil Dead (1981) and certainly effects artist Tom Sullivan said that he’d seen the film on more than one occasion during its original release. Director Sam Raimi has never commented on the basic similarities between the two films (young people travel to a remote cabin in the woods where they are assaulted by supernatural forces) but they’re certainly not hard to spot.