There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

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.

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

Incredibly bad in almost every conceivable way.Let's start with the acting. It was bad. Really bad. Much of it is actually over-acting, of the sort frequently seen in silent film for the benefit of an audience that is living without sound and in a different frame rate.Then there's the language element. Esperanto? At first I thought it was a good and daring choice. I understand Esperanto at a novice level myself so I was surprised and pleased to encounter it in this film that I did not seek out for this reason. But as the film wore on I realized that it was just pretentious and false. Latin or Italian would have made more sense. Or English.The story itself is literally incomprehensible, unless you accept Christian, or more specifically Catholic views of the world. The best example of this is the idea that a person's "soul" is tainted by "killing" a demon that doesn't actually die and stay dead, or that waving your hand at someone in a gesture of the cross can harm them, or that the ocean is made of death. Just pure nonsense.The laugh-out-loud moment comes when the demon turns into a goat-head, which the woman then thrashes around on her chest for a while (apparently it's supposed to be attacking her). But the best it can do is lick its lips and glare at her like the YouTube-famous Dramatic Prairie Dog (you KNEW you saw it before) because, I guess, there's a multi-phase force field around the starship... I mean church.Anyway, the demon was pretty hot, so three points for the hot demon and the giant bat in the mist. That's about it.

Esperanto, a nineteenth-century "all purpose"/international language, almost made a comeback with this stark, moody thriller--thought to be lost for many years until a surviving print resurfaced. Leslie Stevens wrote and directed this tale of a beautiful but soulless female demon, working for the God of Darkness, who tempts and lures men with tortured souls to their deaths in the ocean; tiring of her unchallenged routine, she sets out to destroy a pure, heroic man whose only defense is the power of love. Stevens seems to have overdosed on Ingmar Bergman movies, and is too enamored of Conrad Hall's artistic black-and-white cinematography to really get a grip on his narrative (certainly the editor could have cut back on the many shots of William Shatner wandering...wandering...). However, the ambiance of this film is startling and intriguing, Stevens writes some literate dialogue, and several of Hall's visual compositions are haunting. ** from ****

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.

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.