Change Your Image
johnsabotta
Reviews
Equinox (1970)
The poetic and the demonic vs. 60's suburbia
Yes, it's an amateur 16mm film with stop motion effects, yes it has bad acting and a thin plot - but the people around here who chortle at what a "bad movie" it is (and invoking the loathesome, vandalizing MST3K) are missing a lot. The film has it's own irrational beauty and eccentric charm, and anybody who can make allowances for it's material shortcomings should watch it .There's one moment - when the hapless, doomed teenagers wandering around in some Godforsaken California state park push through the underbrush and see, far away in the distance, a castle where no castle could possibly be - that's unnerving and surrealistically poetic at the same time. That the movie never quite lives up to the promise of this one shot is unfortunate, but no reason not to give EQUINOX (aka THE BEAST) it's due.
The Wizard of Mars (1965)
Strange, beautiful film - deliberate or inadvertent art?
WIZARD OF MARS is very slow, as some of the preceding comments would indicate, but it is also extremely beautiful, and the slow pacing adds to the hypnotic effect. The film is literally like a half-remembered dream, but it's difficult to decide if this is due to deliberate artistic choice or the demands of the "road show" live performance/film feature combination that this film was originally meant for. One should note that certain themes seen in this film (time loops, nature of time) reoccur in other of Hewitt's films - THE TIME TRAVELLERS most notably. This is *not* an Ed Wood-style "bad film" to be laughed at - either you are prepared to make allowances for it and enter it's half-remembered, dream-like Martian landscape, or you just shouldn't bother to watch it at all. Do not expect convential narrative or action - not for fratboy parties or Mystery Science Theatre-oids.