Incubus (1966)

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Incubus (1965) *** (out of 4)Bizarre film is the only one ever to be filmed in Esperanto, a language created in 1887 and needless to say, it was rarely used. The film tells the story of a blond succubus (Allyson Ames) who lures bad men to their deaths. Her latest catch (William Shatner) isn't evil and ends up falling in love with her so the succubus must try and make him go bad. I guess the best way to describe this film is take the images from Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL and mix it with the atmosphere of CITY OF THE DEAD and you come up with this thing. Now, I'm really not sure why Stevens wanted to shoot this in Esperanto as it does nothing for the film. It doesn't add atmosphere, it doesn't add any creepiness and in the end it doesn't add a single thing. What the film does have going for it is some terrific cinematography by future Oscar-winner Conrad Hall. The look of this film is quite remarkable and comes close to the before mentioned Bergman film. The black and white cinematography adds so much to the movie because this is pretty much a story of good and evil. The evil is constantly shown as black and the good is in white. It's a pretty simple thing but it works wonders simply because of the atmosphere it creates. One of the best sequences in the film is a mixture of the two when Ames and Shatner are getting to know one another and an eclipse happens. Both Shatner and Ames are extremely good in their roles. This is where the Esperanto language is most effective and that's by seeing these actors be able to learn it and act their parts while remembering these lines. Shatner is very impressive here as he perfectly gives off that good guy image and makes us believe that he really is a caring guy of God who can fight off evil. In a strange bit of trivia, two of the bad guys here ended up dead within a year of the film being complete and this is something that many believe is a curse of the film. Ann Atmar killed herself shortly after the movie and Milos Milos also killed himself and murdered Mickey Rooney's, at the time, estranged wife. I don't think the film is a complete success mainly because the screenplay itself is pretty weak. There's not too much of a story here so I can't help but think something a little better would have improved the film. With that said, this is certainly an original work and the cinematography and atmosphere make it worth sitting through at least once.

Pretension is arranging the surface perception of being deep without actually being deep. That's why 'Last Year at Marienbad' is not pretentious (It's the real deal). And it's why 'Incubus' is pretentious. It shoehorned full of 'poetic' hyperbole ...foisting wall-to-wall pap on viewers in case they might miss it. Poetics are something a filmmaker stumbles across along a structural path. Half-hearted poetics decimate the structure here. There isn't a single gambit, or any stakes here that concern a viewer.If you'd seen this as a kid, it would have done an end-run around your growing adult taste, and bought your affection with some deliriously well-crafted visuals for a horror movie. The effort behind the camera is very accomplished, and suggests a careful study of old noirs. Really nice work. They can't seem to decide on what night looks like; but day for night looks better here than it ever did in noir.Then there's the horrid acting and that whole Esperanto thing.

I wouldn't call this film awful, compared, say, to a three hour Kevin Costner extravaganza or to any Ben Affleck rubbish you'd care to name. But it is pretentious, silly, and weird. Many of the comments above start with the decision of the screenplay's author to do it all in Esperanto. Must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but for me, the main effect was to persuade most of the cast to memorize and almost chant their lines rather than learn, internalize, and act them. Strangely, Shatner is the only member of the cast who tries to approach the dialog professionally, as if it were actually a dramatic role he's doing, with lines that have a real meaning, and not just something he's reciting for SAG scale.The thing that impressed me most about the film, apart from how good Marc's sister looked partially undressed, was the way the story is heavily imbued with Christian values. This influence appeared now and then in the old Outer Limits shows, but it's extremely rare to find such values in anybody's mainstream cinema, and even rarer in films like this one with pretensions to Bergmanesque artistry.Bottom line: rent it from Netflix for the oddity of it all, but don't take it seriously.And BTW, if Marc couldn't really kill the Incubus, how does the goat manage to kill Amael?

William Shatner made a handful of interesting films in his career; and Incubus is certainly one of them; though unfortunately it qualifies more as an interesting failure. The film is shot in black and white, plays out like a fairytale, handles a story about legendary medieval monsters, succubus's and incubuses, and most bizarrely of all, is shot in the auxiliary language known as 'Esperanto'. Director Leslie Stevens' main influence would appear to be Ingmar Bergman as this film feels a lot like one of his (particularly The Seventh Seal) in terms of style, though it's much less deep than the majority of Bergman films. The film focuses on a 'pure' man named Marc. He becomes the focus of Kia, a succubus who spends her time seducing bad men and luring them to their deaths. She's tired of this, however, and decides that she'd rather pit herself against someone good and who isn't going to hell anyway, which is against the will of her sister Amael (also a succubus). However, things don't quite go to plan for Kia so she goes running back to her sister and the two conjure an incubus...The plot idea behind the film is good and admirable as its "pure" horror, but the execution of the film ensures that it's never as interesting as it could, and by rights, should be. I have no idea why the director would choose to make his film in 'Esperanto', it does make it standout somewhat but it doesn't actually add anything to the movie thus making the language rather pointless. The script is poor anyway and the lead characters spend a hell of a lot of time babbling about things that aren't important, which just makes the film feel like an arty farty load of rubbish. One area that the director does succeed in however is the visual side of things as the film really does look great and we've got some great set-pieces too; the introduction of the incubus being the film's biggest highlight! The film is mercifully short at less than seventy five minutes and that's a good thing as the director seems keen to drag things out as much as possible, which means the film can be a bit of a struggle at times. I respect this film for it's visuals but nothing more really and I can't imagine that this would appeal much to many people.