hyped garbage

A Masterpiece!

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

"Incubus" is one hell of a bizarre and trashy horror film. In fact, it's just bizarre and trashy enough to keep its viewers watching out of sheer curiosity. It doesn't exactly have a strong story; it's based on a novel by Ray Russell, and perhaps something was lost in the transition to film. The story is about brutal rapes & murders being committed in a small New England town named Galen. A relative newcomer to the town, doctor Sam Cordell (a slumming John Cassavetes) tries hard to help the befuddled local police chief, Hank Walden (John Ireland) by working the clues. Meanwhile, Sams' daughter Jenny (Erin Noble) is dating a local boy, Tim Galen (Duncan McIntosh) whose nightmares serve as precursors to the crimes. As directed by John Hough ("The Legend of Hell House"), this is interesting, to say the least. It's a very amusing and relentlessly nasty film that should have its audience feeling some amount of sympathy for the poor female victims. Making it worth sticking with is a central performance by the great, Oscar-nominated Cassavetes, whose face is rarely to be seen here without a bemused smile. The other actors, including Ireland, Noble, McIntosh, Kerrie Keane as the trouble making newspaper editor, Helen Hughes, Harvey Atkin, and Harry Ditson, are okay, but this is definitely Cassavetes's show. People who enjoy twisted little details in stories will be intrigued to watch as he kisses his daughter on the lips and peers at her while she emerges from a shower. Overall this is pretty creepy stuff, and it is NOT without its fun moments. One of them is seeing a pre-Iron Maiden Bruce Dickinson performing with Samson, the band he was in at the time. Another is the sequence with a farming family; the gun-toting dad is struck in the neck with a pitchfork and as a result accidentally blows off his foot! The camera-work in a subsequent scene that reveals a victim through the crack at the bottom of a door is VERY impressive. People also might enjoy the twist ending when the title demons' human guise is revealed. The atmosphere is decent and the gore well executed when it is utilized. There is also some good nudity for the voyeurs among us. Horror fans should find this an acceptable entertainment. Six out of 10.

Seriously, I can easily stomach a lot of on screen blood, gore and repulsiveness, but what really makes this film disturbing & uncomfortable to watch is how the doctor character keeps on rambling about the physical damage done to raped women. He, John Cassavetes of "Rosemary's Baby", talks about ruptured uterus, dry intercourse and massive loads of reddish (?) sperm like they are the most common little ailments in the world of medicine. That being said, "Incubus" is an ultimately STRANGE horror effort. It isn't necessarily awful – although it isn't very good, neither – but just plain weird. The muddled & incoherent script initially revolves on the hunt for a rapist-killer of flesh and blood (even though the title clearly suggests the involvement of a supernatural creature) and it never seems to stop introducing new characters. None of these characters, especially not the main ones, come across as sympathetic and for some never-explained reason they all seem to keep dark secrets. The aforementioned doctor has an odd interpretation of daughter-love and continuously behaves like he's a suspect himself, the town's sheriff (John Ireland) appears to be in a constant state of drunkenness and doesn't even seem to care about who keeps raping & killing the women in his district, the female reporter is even too weird for words and the Galens (an old witch and her grandson) are just plain spooky. All together they desperately try to solve the mystery of whom or what exactly is destroying the towns' women reproducing organs. The sequences building up towards the rapes & murders are admirably atmospheric and the vile acts themselves are bloody and unsettling. Basically these are very positive factors in a horror film, but the narrative structure is too incoherent and the characters are too unsympathetic for "Incubus" to be a really good film. Also, there are quite a few tedious parts to struggle yourself through (like footage of a Bruce Dickinson concert!) and the usually very reliable John Hough's direction is nearly unnoticeable. The final shot is effectively nightmarish, though. For me personally, "Incubus" was a bit of a disappointment, but there are still several enough reasons to recommend this odd piece of early 80's horror to open-minded genre fanatics.

Based on Ray Russell's dark bestseller, this John (WATCHER IN THE WOODS) Hough-directed bust has little going for it.Though it does not lack gory violence, it lack narrative sensibility and "characters".The "Incubus" of the title is a demon endowed with a mammoth penis that shoots red sperm into vaginas during intercourse -- or, to be more precise, rape.John Cassavetes, moonlighting from his successful directing career, is convincing as a doctor who questions the circumstances of the bizarre attacks on young women.Horrific possibilities of the victims spawning demonic offspring are not considered -- and neither is the audience's tolerance for slow moving garbage.The script's reluctance to explore the dramatic repercussions of a fertile premise exemplifies the major problems with this vapid Big-Schlong-On-The-Loose exercise.

This is the worst film I have ever seen. I don't know what the crew was thinking when they shot this, but I'm willing to bet they spent the majority of their time crying. The sound is poorly recorded. The video is grainy and dark, making it difficult to tell what's going on. The actors (read: people who owed the director money) couldn't act for their worthless lives, and the story was not one of the best I've ever seen.SPOILERS: When the father tells the girl that she shouldn't get too close to the townspeople in the beginning of the film, what the crap was he talking about? That, like many other things in this film, never comes up again anywhere in this film. When the farmer is killed in the barn, he has his foot shot off, and in the next scene when he flies out of the hayloft it's still attached to his leg. The dreams the coroner has are creepy, to be sure, but once again, they never make any sense and they never come up again. The ending, what the crap was wrong with that ending?? How did the daughter die? Why did no one seem to care?The characters aren't all that endearing. In fact, I spent the majority of my time wishing the characters would die horrible, horrible deaths, and was severely disappointed when many did not. The actual incubus, when it was finally shown, was laughable. it looked like Swamp-Thing's retarded brother. Quite frankly all of the "frightening" scenes were laughable. Even the nudity, something you'd figure a director couldn't possibly screw up, was made to be creepy. SPOILER AGAIN: in the beginning, when the daughter is naked in the shower with the door open (okay?), the father just stands there for a good solid minute watching her. I assume that the terrible secret the townspeople can't know is they're incestuous, but once again, that's never explained. And did anyone notice that the supposedly small town has a surprising number of large scale office buildings and high-rise apartments and general large city-sized hustle and bustle?This movie should not have been made. I regret ever hearing about it, and the director should be beaten with the original master reel for ever thinking he should do this film. If you don't have the budget for proper scene edits, good sound recording and overdubbing, and acceptable screenwriters, don't make a movie. I can't imagine what the writer of the original novel feels about this film, but I'd be scared to find out.Avoid this movie. Avoid it like the crap-ridden garbage pile that it is. I know it sounds like I'm being overly negative, but if you feel that way, go ahead and watch the movie. Just don't say I didn't warn you.