Monday, January 25, 2016

Incubus (USA 2006)


(Spoilers — but, like, who fucking cares?) Written by Gary Humphreys, who also wrote True True Lie (trailer), another unknown movie likewise filmed that same year in Romania, which, going by a landscape pan near the start of the movie, looks like it might be a beautiful country worth going to. Incubus, however, is not a movie in any way worth watching.
AKA Fear Factory, the original title of Incubus gives hope to some form of sex horror movie, as the literal translation of "incubus" — a male version of a "succubus" — is an evil spirit that descends upon women as they sleep for sexual intercourse. But the film jettisons the fine points of the term and, instead, claims that an incubus is simply some demon that invades your dreams. Wrong — like everything else about this direct-to-digital flick.*
* This movie's minor claim to fame is that it is the first movie ever released specifically as a direct-to-download movie: it premiered on the Internet and was released by AOL on Halloween, 2006. There is a lot of crap on the Internet. 
In all truth, a more fitting title of this "movie" would be A Total Piece of Shit, and that is what we will call it as of now. A cut and dry template for a career-killing movie that doesn't even succeed at being funny bad, A Total Piece of Shit excels only in the amount of boredom it induces. And while it is easy to understand why non-actors with no career might accept a part in a flick like this, it is sad to think that anyone who ever had any career at all, even a minor one like that of Tara Reid, would stoop so low. (To fall any deeper would require a co-starring role with Richard Grieco — see: Webs [2003] and Raiders of the Damned [2005].)
The plot of A Total Piece of Shit is a predictable as the movie itself, and is driven primarily by one laugh-inducing, head-shaking, unbelievable, and bad decision after the other on part of the youthful fodder-cum-wannabe characters. Five minutes into the movie, after a badly lit and shot chase and kill scene in some locked-up compound, these six stock characters are introduced and it quickly becomes obvious that they are not only bound to die and that they probably subconsciously want to die, but that they are all bona-fide candidates for the Darwin Awards: every decision made in the movie, like most of the dialogue, is not only illogical, but screams "Kill me!" Indeed, we have seldom seen a movie in which the characters all deserved to die more than they do in A Total Piece of Shit.
Our six idiots — semi-Final Girl Jay (Tara Reid), her brother Josh (Russell Carter), and friends Peter (Christian Brassington) and Karen (Monica Barladeanu of Caved In [2006 / trailer] and Fall Down Dead [2007 / trailer]) and Holly (Alice O'Connell) and token Afro-American Bug (Akemnji Ndifernyan) — survive a nasty car accident (unscratched!) while returning home from a camping trip in the mountains of Montana, a camping trip that obviously involved no camping equipment but does involve Karen wearing "five-hundred-dollar boots". Of course, they do the logical thing of wandering off the road and across the countryside and, since they're going to freeze if they stay outside, breaking into the first fenced-in and locked-up building they happen to stumble upon — by rappelling (!!!) 30 meters down through an opening on the roof. (Here Karen, who early on shows herself to be the stupid bitch, proves to be the smartest one there by turning around and leaving. By dint of the film's closing scene, she actually turns out to be the movie's true Final Girl.) Trapped in the compound, they stumble upon the so-called incubus, a sleeping murderer (Mihai Stanescu of Catacombs [2007 / trailer]) instantly recognized by Jay. ("It's the guy who bit off his tongue...") Only, instead of being put to death as reported to the press, the bad boy had been handed over to bad people conducting bad experiments. As can be guessed, once the non-teen teen idiots enter the compound, the rest of A Total Piece of Shit is basically about them running around a lot and making more stupid decisions, all of which lead to them dying one by one.
In any event, any person with a brain — and probably even those without one — won't find anything mildly of interest in A Total Piece of Shit, which drags on for way too long and does nothing but stumble from one annoying stupidity to the other, torturing all viewers (or at least those that don't save themselves by falling asleep or turning the movie off) with interminable, noxious boredom. We can only guess A Total Piece of Shit was made as a tax deduction and not as a serious project, for no one making a serious movie (unless truly untalented) would make a movie like this, a movie so moribund and lethargic and unintelligent and uncreative that its overriding and all-encompassing inability and carelessness doesn't even manage to garner giggles. (How carelessly was the movie made? Well, one character kills his possessed girlfriend and doesn't even blink. They use flashlights even when the lights are on and complain that the batteries are getting low. And — perhaps the most subtle of all the mistakes — characters who have bitten off their tongue talk totally normal moments later.)
Nothing exciting happens, nothing scary happens, nothing is well-shot or well-acted, nothing is in any way interesting or involving or worth wasting your time on in A Total Piece of Shit. We saw A Total Piece of Shit so you don't have to.

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