Please understand. When I give this only a 2/10, that really is a pretty accurate assessment of the quality of the movie in almost every respect. I'm not knocking the kids who made it. It was apparently done by a bunch of relatively inexperienced young people on a shoestring budget, and I respect the effort that was put into it - but the fact that somebody tried hard isn't going to make me pretend that this is anything but what it is - a really bad horror movie about four young people who on a hike through the woods discover a book about evil that eventually has them doing battle with the devil. The stop motion animation on the various creatures that appear can be forgiven - not only was this a shoestring budget, but it was also made in 1970. The field of special effects was still developing, and the creatures were quite fine. It was more the acting and the dialogue than any of the technical aspects that dragged this down. The dialogue between the characters didn't seem natural. More than anything, it sounded dubbed (even though this was obviously done in English) - almost as if the movie had been filmed and then the dialogue was redone later. Maybe that was typical of very low budget movies in the era? I'm not sure about that but I found it very distracting, because the dialogue wasn't always in sync with the mouths of the actors - even though even a cursory bit of lip reading confirms that the actors were saying the words we were hearing.
Really this is most interesting for some of the names that are associated with it. One of the four young people (Jim) is played by Frank Bonner, who would go on to much greater fame some years later as Herb Tarlek on the TV show "WKRP in Cincinnati." I also did a double take when, glancing at the credits as they rolled at the start of the movie, I noticed that the assistant camera man was Ed Begley, Jr! Also, Dennis Muren (uncredited as one of the directors) went on to do some visual effects work on some pretty big movies, including several of the Star Wars episodes and Battlestar Galactica. So there was obviously some talent (or at least some potential talent) involved with this which makes it worth watching as a curiosity, but little more. (2/10)
Really this is most interesting for some of the names that are associated with it. One of the four young people (Jim) is played by Frank Bonner, who would go on to much greater fame some years later as Herb Tarlek on the TV show "WKRP in Cincinnati." I also did a double take when, glancing at the credits as they rolled at the start of the movie, I noticed that the assistant camera man was Ed Begley, Jr! Also, Dennis Muren (uncredited as one of the directors) went on to do some visual effects work on some pretty big movies, including several of the Star Wars episodes and Battlestar Galactica. So there was obviously some talent (or at least some potential talent) involved with this which makes it worth watching as a curiosity, but little more. (2/10)