Nu, Kapitano, kion vi faras en hororo filmo?
Incubus (1965)
[Inkubo]
Grade: C
Continuing our detour from the Mill Creek box, we watched the Shat -- not to be confused with the Schach -- in Incubus, a film that manages to be infamous on multiple fronts. To wit: it was believed lost for many years, and the only surviving print has burned-in French subtitles. It allegedly carries a "curse" that, shortly after the film's completion, yielded two suicides (one of them a murder-suicide) among the cast members.
And -- oh yeah -- it's completely in Esper-fuckin'-anto. (That would be an example of an infix, for all you budding linguists out there.) Thus the burned-in subtitles, which are obscured by an ugly but necessary black box for the English-language subs.
Another site describes Incubus as "some kind of hybrid of an Ingmar Bergman film with Manos: The Hands of Fate", which is pretty much spot on -- though, at least plot-wise, you could probably throw in a dash of Night Tide too. It tells a moody tale of a succubus who drowns sinful men at the behest of an evil cult...
...until she meets a man who's not so easily corrupted. (Three guesses who.)
The movie's deliberate pace and philosophizing dialogue are certainly reminiscent of Bergman, as is the positively gorgeous cinematography by Conrad Hall (of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and American Beauty fame). For many of the films we watch, we find ourselves struggling to find a decent screenshot; Incubus presents us instead with an embarrassment of riches, with almost every frame akin to a well-composed photograph.
It's true that, by using Esperanto, the events in Incubus become weirdly unmoored from any specific time, place, or culture: we literally have no idea when or where these events are meant to be happening. It's disorienting, and certainly contributes to the film's unsettled atmosphere.
It's also true that, even to a non-speaker of Esperanto, the dialogue in this film is painfully stilted both in its delivery and its pronunciation: most of the actors -- who allegedly learned their lines phonetically, and on short notice -- are clearly uncomfortable with the language, and their line readings suffer as a result.
The interesting exception is Shatner, who (at least in the early going) is noticeably more fluent than his colleagues. We've read that he speaks Esperanto with a pronounced French-Canadian accent, but better that than a Southern California accent, n'est-ce pas? (Dude?)
Shatner's hammy behavior in the wake of Star Trek has made it easy to overlook that he's always been a committed, disciplined actor. Whatever his personal shortcomings, his fame is at least partly the product of dues paid through years of hard work, by being damn good at his job and giving it everything he's got.
In the case of Incubus, he does what he can to make the best of a difficult situation; while he can't singlehandedly elevate the film, he's certainly not a liability -- and almost had us believing he could carry this off.
We also took notice of Milos Milos as the titular incubus. Shame he was the perp in that murder-suicide we mentioned above, as there's real menace in his leering, demonic performance -- and while some of it is attributable to good direction and cinematography, this Serb clearly had screen presence.
But ultimately it's hard to see Incubus as anything more than a beautifully filmed miscalculation. Pretentious and portentous, it nonetheless manages to conjure an atmosphere of real foreboding -- but neither its muddled narrative nor the stiff cast supply the foundation needed for Incubus's atmosphere to amount to more than just ambience. It has the visual flair and tortured quality of a Bergman film, sure, but not the intelligence or finely crafted performances characteristic of Ingmar's work.
All in all, certainly worth seeing (especially in the most literal sense), but not a good film. Sorry, Cap'n.
As a side note, Incubus is just about the last movie in our massive review backlog that, when we began chipping away at it with our most recent Ed Wood entry, dated back to August 2014. Since kicking into high gear in October of last year, we've been covering films that we initially watched between December 2014 and December 2015. With over 50 films in the backlog it seemed insurmountable when we first started, but here we are, out of the woods.
For a variety of reasons we didn't watch many movies for most of 2016, though Incubus was one of the few; others -- at least the ones potentially relevant to this blog -- include:
- Jungle Moon Men, one of the more offensively terrible films we've ever seen from a mainstream studio;
- The Howling and King Kong, two films far too famous to need our two cents on 'em;
- Chandu the Magician, an amusing but threadbare romp with Béla, and One Million Years B.C., a less enjoyable (and bone-stupid) romp with Raquel.
In our next entry we'll cover the only two Mill Creek box films we watched in 2016. Once that's done, we'll be fully caught up, and from that point forward, everything you read from us will be hot off our cinematic presses and fresh in our minds -- which will, in turn, spare us the experience of having to watch the likes of Frankenstein 80, A Face in the Fog, and Midnight Phantom twice.
September 2018 will also mark the approximate 10-year anniversary of this project, with the anniversary of our first blog post coming two months after that; with roughly 70 films between us and the end of the 250-pack, perhaps it's not inconceivable (hi, Wally!) that we'll finish it up in time for the site's one-decade mark? We'll see!
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