The Hoax (1972)

          Featuring a plot so thin it could barely power a sitcom episode, jokes so anemic they mostly elicit indifference, and a musical score so overzealous that cues land like the rim shots nightclub comics use to juice lifeless routines, The Hoax strains viewer patience throughout its 85-minute running time. About the only things that make the picture tolerable are an outlandish premise, an early-career performance by someone who later became a familiar face on TV, and the choice to keep things in a family-friendly lane even though the storyline focuses on two grown men, one of whom is portrayed as a bachelor with a vigorous sex life—while nothing in the story invites R-rated treatment, innumerable low-budget comedies have used course language and nudity to compensate for missing laughs. All of which is a means of saying that while The Hoax is not a good feature comedy, one gets the sense the folks involved put forth a measure of sincere effort. Accordingly, the movie gets whatever meager credit one awards for vaulting a low bar.
          Set in LA (of course), the movie follows two wiseass friends, Clete (Frank Bonner) and Cy (Bill Ewing), who make a wild discovery while exploring a tidal pool—an American hydrogen bomb washed ashore completely intact. Upon confirming via news reports the bomb is legit, the dudes blackmail the city by threatening to explode the device unless citizens send $1 each to a Swiss bank account. The plot doesn’t involve much more than that, excepting inevitable scenes of bumbling authorities trying to identify the blackmailers, plus slightly more imaginative scenes of Southern Californians wrangling with the prospect of impending doom. Given that you’ve never heard of The Hoax, it should come as no surprise to learn the filmmakers failed to exploit the comedic potential of their central concept—instead of a satire exploring greed and paranoia, the filmmakers deliver silly farce powered by amateurish performances and dopey scripting. (Example: After the lads remove part of the bomb’s tailfin to prove they’ve got the device, Cy moans, “I’ve never worked so hard for a piece of tail in my life!”)
          As for the aforementioned TV notable, that would be costar Bonner, latter to achieve fame as sleazy salesman Herb Tarlek on WKRP in Cincinnati. Calling him the movie’s standout would be exaggerating, but he’s sufficiently comfortable on camera that he at least seems like a professional actor, whereas his primary scene partner, Ewing, mugs and over-emotes to a tiresome degree. Ewing later found success as a studio executive.

The Hoax: FUNKY

Equinox (1970)

          An awful movie that’s probably only of interest to special-effects junkies, Equinox took a peculiar path to the screen. In 1967, college student Dennis Muren spent a reported $6,500 to make a short film titled The Equinox . . . A Journey Into the Supernatural, featuring imaginative stop-motion monsters in the style of Ray Harryhausen. Impressive for an amateur production, the picture caught the eye of distributors, who acquired the film and hired editor-turned-director Jack Woods to shoot additional scenes. The resulting hodgepodge was released in 1970 under the shortened title Equinox, and the movie might have disappeared into obscurity had Muren not achieved fame for his subsequent, Oscar-winning work on Star Wars (1977) and other pictures. The narrative of Equinox is a trite contrivance about a quartet of college students heading into the mountains to visit their professor. The kids stumble onto a weird book containing satanic incantations, and an evil policeman named Asmodeus (played by additional-footage director Woods) pursues them because he wants the book. Creature attacks and demonic possessions ensue.

          Although the effects in Equinox are quite crude—key visuals include a giant blue ape and a flying demon, plus an invisibility-shrouded gateway to another dimension—achieving so much with so little was a noteworthy accomplishment. Unfortunately, the acting is atrocious, the continuity is terrible, the camerawork is shaky, and the writing is ghastly, particularly the numbingly obvious dialogue. Equinox isn’t unwatchable, partly because it’s so short (80 minutes) and partly because monsters pop up every so often to keep things lively, but its origins as a student film are painfully evident in every frame. That said, the picture’s in-your-face flaws probably explain why Equinox's 197o release included a trip through the midnight-movie circuit, where viewers often watch bad films ironically. FYI, costar Frank Bonner, billed here as Frank Boers Jr., later found notoriety as oily salesman Herb Tarlek on the cult-favorite 1978-1982 sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. Inexplicably, Equinox is available on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection, which includes many classics of high-art world cinema.

Equinox: LAME