It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

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?

"Incubus" is a very strange movie to be sure – it's unique because it is the only film ever shot in the "universal language", Esperanto. It may be worth it for some viewers to see the film simply because it has camp-master William Shatner speaking his lines in this never-land language. But not for me. From the very first moments of the film you can tell what you're looking at – a good photographer with a bunch of amateur actors and an overambitious director gathered on the beaches of Big Sur in a desperate attempt to capture some of the magic of Ingmar Bergman's films "The Seventh Seal" and "Hour of the Wolf" and apply that magic to a straight-up horror film in the occult vein.The story is very confusing despite being very simple, due to the cryptic dialog and ineffective direction. I've seen it twice now so this is what I have been able to piece together – Shatner is playing a guy who is some kind of idyllic woodsman who lives with his sister in a cabin. A female devil worshipper sees him somewhere and gets a crush on him so she decides to corrupt him and make him a Satanist too, which her sister discourages. Soon Shatner is following the evil woman across a lovingly photographed wasteland, back to the beach again, and eventually he is involved in a confrontation with the "Incubus" (a male version of a Succubus, for those not in the know… this movie won't tell you so I might as well).The "Incubus" is literally a goat that someone put on top of Shatner that kicks him a bit and then disappears. Outside of some interesting but unoriginal photographic effects there really is nothing happening in this movie. Shatner's character completely forgets about the sister character, who has been blinded by a solar eclipse and spends most of the movie wandering around. There's no scares whatsoever. Maybe this movie appeals to people who like surrealist cinema. Usually I don't like that kind of thing anyway so I couldn't tell you if this is a good or a bad example of that school of cinema. My guess is that it's bad, and it's certainly bad from my perspective as someone who expects at least a minimum of character development and plot in a film.However the music is interesting and the photography is great. This is a good movie to watch if you were curious how to distinguish directing from photography because this is a very poorly directed but well photographed film. Other than that and the fact that it has Esperanto dialog there's nothing to distinguish it or make it memorable.By the way, I was able to see it this time in a 35mm presentation in the theater thanks to the producer Anthony Taylor who has a nice print and lives in Southern California.

Incubus is one of those films that seem to have appeared from a parallel universe - a wonderfully atmospheric film (imagine Lovecraft filmed by Ingmar Bergman!) that was completely lost until the mid 90s. A floating allegory set on a mythical island, a pre-Star Trek Shatner stars as Marc, an innocent Christ-like figure tempted by a sister tag-team of succubi out collecting souls for their infernal master. The younger demoness Kia (played by Allyson Ames) falls in love with his purity which has dire consequences for both of them. After Kia runs screaming from a church Marc has blissfully dragged her to, her sister Amael (Eloise Hardt) raises an Incubus from the pit of hell (which, despite being some scaffolding and cheap theatrical lighting tricks, is a sight to warm the cockles of Brueghel's heart). Esperanto was devised in the late 1800s by Ludovic Zamenhof, an idealistic professor who wanted a universal language to unite humanity. It was quite popular until the Great Wars, which proved once and for all that mankind is destined to remain dumb, angry and divided. Beatnik and would-be mystic director Leslie Stevens obviously shared Zamenhof's idealism, and thus Incubus stands as the language's only feature. It's a bizarre soundtrack to Stevens' visuals - stark black and white photography, beautifully composed, with the robed figures representing a grand battle between good and evil. It's as if Bergman's The Seventh Seal was painstakingly transcribed and translated into pigeon Norwegian.The results are surreal, to say the least, and the final appearance of the Devil as a bedraggled farmyard goat is too much, even for a low-budget horror film with SERIOUS pretensions. Arty, insane, and with Shatner reportedly spouting the worst accent in the history of Esperanto, we unleash the beast from the pit: the 1965 Incubus.