Incubus

Incubus (2002)

1/2 (out of 4)

Jess Franco remakes his very own Lorna, The Exorcist with horrid results, which is the case with the recent Franco/One Shot productions. Twenty years earlier a father made a deal with an incubus that she gives his fame and wealth in return for his daughter on her 20th birthday. The original film is one of my favorite Euro Horrors but this thing here is just downright awful from the poor script to the poor acting to the horrid direction. Franco's "talents" can be debated but this recent stuff is just incredibly bad. I did give the film half a star due to the music score by Daniel White but this was just lifted from Franco's The Perverse Countess.

If this piece of garbage was good enough to be considered an actual "movie" then it could easily be the worst movie ever made. It is so appalling from start to finish, with absolutely no redeeming features, that it is an insult to all of those people who make a serious effort to create real movies.

All aspects of the production of this "thing" are simply dreadful. The camera work is terrible, with neither technical nor artistic talent in evidence. No effort appeared to be made to add interesting lighting or even fill in the shadows. The sound track was downright annoying at times. And the staff, not good enough to be called a "cast", showed no ability to act.

What could have been an interesting plot was completely lost in the dreadful script. What could have been interesting erotica was reduced to a few shots of shaven pubic hair. And considering the staff were naked for much of the time, no effort appeared to be made to add make-up to a group of people who were not physically attractive enough for me to actually want to see them naked.

I must admit I watched the whole thing. I just couldn't believe someone would waste this much plastic to put it on a DVD.

Let's face it. Jess Franco has not yet made a good movie. One would think, given his experience and the fact that he worked under Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Goddard, you'd think he could stumble once and make one but the fact is he hasn't. Franco, despite the cult that has arose around him, is a sleaze director, not a criticism mind you. However, In recent years, Franco has not even made a decent crap film. Ones like Mari- Cookie, Lust For Frankenstein, and Incubus and been pure waste of film stock, well almost. Gone is the atmosphere of Franco's 70's and 80's trash film and now it is replaced by totally incomprehensible story lines, which is a feat given they were never Franco's strong points, and digital camera work which makes his recent film look even sleazy, in a bad way! Incubus does not have all that much going for it. Save for Lina Romay, you'd rather all the other actresses keep their clothes on, which none do. The high point of the story is Ms. Romay totally naked arguing with her husband in the bedroom, which given the seemingly none existant storyline, may have been what this film was about. To prove a point, Franco's Ilsa movie had more of a plot than Incubus. Save your money and time. Leave this film alone.

With Franco making a plethora of films in the new millennium on the digital stock that is flooding the market it is nice to see a bizarre film like INCUBUS leap from the director's fertile mind. a pleasure to have a film that you must watch, pay attention to and interpret what it means to you. Franco is the master of tangent film making. Lina Romay is still gorgeous after all these years and it's a pleasure to see such a lovely lady still gracing her lovers film. Sure, some of his recent work seems a bit...rushed, but INCUBUS is good stuff. It is time for all the Franco naysayers to just leave the man alone. If you don't like it, don't watch. No matter what you say the true Franco fans will be here to watch every frame that the madman genius of cinema creates.

I watched an English dub of this film, which, though it's hard to believe such a thing is possible, made a dreadful movie even worse. The plot was infantile, the 'eroticism' was about as non-erotic as it is possible to get and the actors, of both genders, were hardly blood tingling! I think the actors who read the dubbed script, particularly the male lead, learned the fine nuances of delivery from reading the warnings on the back of cigarette packets.

I have tried, as I do when writing reviews for the I.M.D.B, to find a single redeeming thing about the film but I am defeated. The film was a failure on almost every front - as a horror movie it was laughable, as an erotic film it was a bore and the story line was, I'm sure written by a couple of seven-year-olds!

Altogether a complete waste of 90 minutes. Mr Franco will never be a Martin Scorsese or even a Tinto Brass but this is awful even by his standards!