Equinox (1970) – It started out as a student film, which was then expanded to feature length. The acting and script aren’t great. But when you realize that the original directors included Dennis Muren (FX genius involved in a bunch of Star Wars movies, Battlestar: Galactica, Jurassic Park and others), you realize that what makes it special isn’t either of those things: it’s the special effects meticulously edited on a student-film budget — stop-motion animation, in-camera split screens, forced perspective, etc. You want to throw this movie in the face of today’s current DIY filmmakers and say, “Leave the crappy CGI behind! Do this instead!”
I don’t know if Equinox is “worthy” of being part of the Criterion Collection, but it is, so you know you can get a really really good copy.
The Cat People (1942) – I hadn’t seen this for at least thirty years, and it still holds up. A single Serbian beauty (Simone Simon) falls for a corn-fed all-American in New York, but the folklore with which she was raised — specifically, that she’s descended from one of the demon-worshiping “cat people” who will turn into great cats and kill their lovers — proves to be, shall we say, a hindrance to marital bliss. (It wasn’t until the movie was over that I wondered, “Wait — if cat people are so uncontrollably deadly, how can one be descended from them?”)
Unlike so many other horror movies of the era (I’m looking squarely at you, Universal), it’s an understated thriller, told with subtlety, subtext, and plausible deniability of the fantastic elements. Plus, Simone Simon was had a definite cuteness about her which, unlike other standards of beauty, doesn’t go out of style.
Requiescant (1967) – A young boy, the lone survivor of a massacre of Mexican villagers by ex-Confederate nasties, is adopted by a traveling preacher and his family. A decade later, the Mexican boy is now a young man with green eyes and heavy brown greasepaint, and his foster sister is an exuberant young lady with bad impulse control. When she runs off to join a traveling troupe of dancers and is then roped into forced prostitution, her adopted brother goes after her — discovering along the way that, even though he’s never touched a pistol before, he’s a natural dead shot. He earns the name “Resquiescant” from the prayer he mumbles over the bodies of those he’s forced to kill (for those who don’t know these things, like me, “Resquiescant” is Latin for “Rest in peace”). Eventually the people he butts heads with are the same ones responsible for the massacre — funny how that works! — and he he becomes the lightning rod for the scattered Mexicans who were supposed to get the land that the baddies have appropriate.
There are plenty of unlikelihoods piled on top of each other here, but the story moves at a quick enough pace that you don’t have time to dwell on them. (Aside from the green eyes. They’re really hard to ignore.)