The Worst Film Ever

Let's be realistic.

A lot of fun.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I was looking forward to getting my teeth into this film because the plot sounded so unusual, freaky, curious and interesting. For the first half hour or so I really enjoyed it but after that point I began to realise I was watching a film with 2 main story lines (rather than a main plot plus sub plots).The 2 were plots were: The story of Alan (the patient who had attacked the horses) and; The story of Martin, the therapist treating him. For me, the plots opposed rather than complimented each other and I found myself enjoying the film when it focused on Alan. His character and his interactions with his family and Jenny Agutter's character were all very interesting.However, this interesting story line kept getting interrupted by soliloquies by the therapist that I felt were melodramatic and I just kept wanting to tell him to lighten up. These speeches direct to the camera, as well as his scenes with his therapist friend, were all just about him being miserable and moaning about everything. I know the whole idea was to show how much the patient had had an affect on the therapist as what the therapist had had on the patient but for me it just slowed the whole story down and added a large dose of unnecessary melodrama. So for me half of the film was really good and the other half was really dull.

... What more is there to know? If I could explain this movie to someone, I would say "A mentally ill boy does things with a horse that are sick and inappropriate." I didn't watch the play, but it looks more intriguing than the movie. Seemed like the movie lost the magic of the play.The main character was the biggest problem. He is not a smart, philosophical person. He barely explains his behaviors and always snaps at his counselor and parents in anger. He just does whatever he wants. He has orgasms on the horse and touches its private parts for his own selfish pleasures (without the horse's consent). Even when the horseman approached him on the beach, he did not say a single word to him and stared at the horse. The boy is mentally ill, but there's no excuse for being that silly.It's a film for someone who likes "straightjacket entertainment." It worked as a tragedy, too. He loved a horse but could not love a real human being. Mostly because he was self-centered. Did not enjoy watching him drive everyone away. However, I did enjoy the scene where he rode the horse on the beach. But it seems like the movie was not in the same league with the play.

Equus is a strange and challenging psychodrama that employs strange visual occurrences such as the pentimento effect and a boy who subjects himself to the relative experience of a domesticated horse. There is an extended full-frontal nude scene with two seventeen-year-olds. The crime at the heart of the story is blinding of six horses with a metal spike by one of the seventeen-year-olds, yes, the one who harnesses and whips himself to undergo what a human does to a horse. It is acted with sublime gravity by Richard Burton, Joan Plowright and Peter Firth. And Sidney Lumet tells this highly unusual and intensely deep story with his unerring directorial philosophy of concision, necessity and character fidelity.I said Equus is challenging and strange, but it's not challenging because it's strange, but because it revolves around the act of savagely brutalizing creatures so innately innocent, loyal and beautiful, in a way so tragic in its consequences for them, and yet it is done by the most unassuming youngster, actually one with an obsessive affinity for the creatures he comes to maim. It is a crime so disturbing and yet makes absolutely no apparent sense, even to Richard Burton's veteran psychiatrist, who has dedicated his life to helping and understanding children and teenagers. We begin to think it has something to do with the boy's upbringing. In a sheltered and smothering environment, as an only child on a farm, what enormity of doubt could be instilled in that growing mind when one loving parent reads to him daily from the Bible and the other loving parent disdains it? And yet his atheist father is so sheepish by nature, his deeply orthodox Christian mother so kind and civilized. She at one point urges that they've always shown love and caring for their only son and given him all they could, and desperately demands to be believed. What the hell happened in that stable? Or rather, what could've possibly led to it?It is such a deeply layered, bleakly filmed and painstakingly performed probing of a missing cause and devastating effect that the theme that seems most consistent at its core is purely juxtaposition. I mentioned the term "pentimento," and if you've seen Fred Zinnemann's great film Julia, you've heard the definition of it, how it describes the occurrence of one painting that in its alterations reveals another original painting underneath it. We find that every night for a long time, the boy had a drawing above his bed…of a horse. This drawing has been reworked from the initial drawing, one of Christ on the cross. And the eye of this juxtaposed horse is what sets off the boy's deep-seated reaction to crucified Jesus. Or is that what the eye sets off? What is it about this eye that the boy feels is staring at him all night, like it's alive, like it's judging him?The motif of juxtaposition continues its odd, omniscient thread to the psychiatrist himself. As Burton brings to light the realities beneath the boy's demons, he finds himself inexorably confronting his own. The questions he directly poses to us through soliloquy converge with those buried in his disturbed patient. Why do people do such extreme things at all? What is the purpose of preventing them from doing them? Well, because they can be horrible, cruel. I personally may not be able to revisit the tasteful and shocking scene where it is finally shown on screen what this kid did to these horses. I haven't even mentioned the elements of his sexual attraction to horses, the fact that his attraction to Jenny Agutter's character is directly linked to her contact with horses. Or that he and she run into his father outside a porn theater. But can there ever be a certain explanation for this boy? The fact that Burton must hypnotize him or give him a placebo he claims to be a truth pill in order to unearth most of the boy's story is an indication that even its first-hand source isn't reliable; he is shackled by such wildly contradictory impulses that he cannot help but do these things then later has such trouble facing them that he submerges the memories.And yet, the motif of juxtaposition yet again comes full circle, because all in all, this film belongs to Burton, it is his character's story, his to augment or diminish. As the psychiatrist, hampered with a hollow, discontented life of his own submissive doing, Burton has a mere six or seven scenes, from the play's staging, breaking the fourth wall. He bookends the film, and by Lumet's haunting closing shot (a sort of inverted version of his disquieting final long shot in Long Day's Journey Into Night), the camera punctuates the film by tightening not on the eyes of a horse, nor the eyes of Peter Firth, but on Richard Burton's. Encumbered by Lumet's somber, austere London atmosphere, Schaffer's story is an unprecedented and harrowing revelation of how many meaningful layers there are to a meaningless existence. Next time we hear about one person's shocking, unforgivable crime, we may not only say they deserve to go to prison for life or they deserve to die, but that maybe they endowed themselves with significance in the only way they knew how.

This is the predictable over-the-top dramatic tosh that they dished up in the early heyday of Larry's 'National Theatre', when the all-male literati still ruled London. It's loaded with all the required themes: paganism, devil worship, bestiality, Biblical delusions and psychiatry, but what it's really about is why men hate and fear a naked, willing woman, something that the production itself reinforces. A far more interesting topic, IMO, would be how women put up with screwed-up men like Alan Strang (Firth). But that would never do, would it. It's a man's world, and it's Strang who is "feeling pain", not Jill Mason (Agutter), the woman he treated brutally, before deflecting his impotent rage on to his kinky hang-up: horses. And a brilliant doctor has been persuaded to treat Strang, not Mason, who surely requires post-traumatic stress therapy. Author Shaffer cleverly introduces an ironical second layer of plot when shrink Dr Dysart (Burton) reveals that he is jealous of the madman Strang, who may be barmy, but at least he has "known passion", unlike the prosaic doctor. Probably only a cabal of gays could come up with such utter rubbish and win glittering prizes for it. But that was a generation ago, and Equus has slipped into well-deserved obscurity since then.