Incubus stars a pre-Star Trek William Shatner as an average good guy. The story follows a succubus who is tired of seducing the villains, the flawed people, and the dredge of society. She decides she wants to seduce a genuinely good guy, and she sets off to find one. She happens upon Shatner, who's living with his sister. Succubus enters the scene, tries to seduce Shatner, and he remains a good guy. Convinced she can do it, she persists, and an incubus is raised in the meantime to seduce Shatner's sister.
Filmed in black and white, the cinematography is easily the best thing about this movie. I knew, somehow, that the cinematographer had won an Oscar just by looking at this movie. Sure enough, actually the dude has won 3 Oscars for cinematography! So this movie is fuckin fantastic to look at. It has a style that's unique to itself, which brings us to the whole "language" thing.
Perhaps the best known piece of knowledge about this movie is that it was filmed in the language of Esperanto, with English subtitles. Esperanto is a language that was created as an idea to bridge the European languages which are all similar but have their differences: English, Italian, French, Spanish, etc. It remained alive for a little while, in fact there are probably some people still speaking it today, however it never really took off in any way and obviously we aren't speaking it today in good ol' USA. The "reason" besides for art's sake was because Esperanto, although not widely spoken, is at least semi present throughout most of the world, thus some people would understand it and......yeah, you know what, it was done for art's sake. Explanation over.
I can say it's easily one of Shatner's best. Being not his own voice, inflections and language, we are forced to not take him as so "Shatner-esque" and that helps. Also, I dunno if you know this, but he wasn't in a shitload of great movies. Haha. Amiright? My favorite movie of his would most likely be 1964's The Outrage, based on Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. But this is easily second place.
The plot is pretty cool and easy to follow, and the setting and the movie is all minimal. It has those classic ingredients that a movie lover should love: good camera work, straight story, bizarre quality to it. Somehow, though, I wasn't terribly impressed. It is good, I just was perhaps not in the right mood for it. I dunno, you can crucify me later though if you want.
I'll give it 4 stars though, cause I know it's good, I just wasn't too sure 'bout it.
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