Our surreal subtitled journey begins near the township of Nomen Tumm. Rumored to be a place of dark miracles, one of its mystical anomalies in particular concerns a local well that is said to contain curative properties, which can restore the youth and health of those who are pure in heart. Unfortunately, most who come to drink from its waters are more of the vain and evil variety. Also of note, a coven of female succubus have set up camp nearby, and using their demonic, feminine wiles, lure those who are corrupt away to the sea. And once there, the demons drown their easy prey, sending their sinful souls to their master, the Evil One, in hell.

After luring one such putz to the beach, Kia (Allyson Ames) puts the lethal, finishing touch on the latest lout. Growing tired of these contemptible fools, Kia yearns for the challenge of going after someone who is pure and good. Confessing these desires to Amael (Eloise Heart), the head succubus, Kia is told to not even think such thoughts. Noble spirits are not to be trifled with, Amael warns, for they have a bad habit of corrupting unsuspecting demons with some evil thing called "love."

Despite these warnings, Kia goes in search of someone who is pure in heart to lead astray. Heading to the local monastery, an obvious place to start, she finds the monks there are into some weird religious practices that involves toad-sucking. With that idea gone bust, she returns to the healing well and spies a brother and sister reeling up the bucket. Watching Arndis (Ann Atmar) help her crippled brother, Marco, take a rejuvenating drink, an intrigued Kia follows them home; but along the way, Amael blocks her path and pleads with Kia to just forget her schemes, especially with this man. For Marco is a returning war hero, who faced death and rescued many others without hesitation, making him the noblest spirit of all...

And who is this Marco character? Why it’s none other than old James Tiberius Kirk himself, William Shatner. Yes, the same guy who in less than a year's time would jump in the sack at the drop of a tri-corder is our pure, noble soul. Try to refrain from laughing too hard, okay?

After you pick your jaw up off the floor you might be asking Is this a foreign film? Nope. Then what language is that? Italian? Greek? Russian? Nope. None of the above. Truthfully, the answer to both questions lie in the origins of Esperanto, a nativeless tongue which loosely translates into hope eternal.

Kion diable vi estas priparol? 

What in the hell am I talking about? Well, feeling that language barriers were the biggest roadblock to true world peace and understanding, back in 1887, Dr. Lejzer Ludwik Zamenhof published the book Unua Libro in which he laid out the groundwork for Esperanto, an artificial dialect that he hoped would one day become the universal second language for the entire planet. Over the years, Zamenhof's ersatz vocabulary was fleshed-out an expanded, and though it never really flourished, it has been amazingly stubborn and tenacious in its refusal to wither and die on the vine like most other failed global social experiments. The language resurfaced again briefly after the second World War, and had another resurgence in the jet-set age of the early 1960's.

Enter television producer Leslie Stevens. A noted sci-fi and fantasy enthusiast, Stevens had just successfully launched the anthology program, The Outer Limits, in 1963 when he put pen to paper for a new screenplay, the results of which you are now reading about. Securing financing through his Daystar Productions, and borrowing most of the cast and crew from his television series -- including the then relatively unknown Shatner (Cold Hands, Cold Heart), composer Dominic Frontiere, and most importantly, future award-winning cinematographer Conrad Hall (with an uncredited assist from William Fraker) -- Stevens' troupe spent ten days filming around an old Spanish mission at Big Sur, where the director and cinematographer proceeded to get their Bergman on something fierce. And wanting to give his ethereal and elemental tale of good vs. evil a dissociative and timeless quality, Stevens translated the entire script into Esperanto, and took things so far that he demanded that Esperanto be the only language spoken on set. Unfortunately, none of the actors were fluent and had to speak their lines phonetically, and at no point had any clue as to what they were really saying. Which is hilarious when looked at in hindsight, but on film it just adds another bizarre and baffling element to an already bizarre and baffling film that we've barely scratched the surface of. Or as our friend Marco would say:

Determined to get a hero into hell, Kia once again ignores Amael and wanders onto Marco’s farm. Posing as a lost traveler, the siblings offer her food and shelter, and as the she-demon weaves a tale to get her hooks into Marco, it suddenly grows dark as a solar eclipse ominously blots out the sun. And though Marco warns his sister not to look directly at it, when Arndis goes out to check on the animals, she can’t resist a quick peak and is flash-blinded by the strange solar phenomenon.

Quick aside here: I remember back when I was in kindergarten in the 1970s, they wouldn’t let us out for recess during a solar eclipse because they thought we’d all go blind staring at it. Your welcome. On with the review!

Baiting the trap further, when Kia expresses a desire to go home Marco offers to escort her. Outside, the blinded Arndis tries to call for her brother, but Amael has cast a spell on her, silencing her cries for help. And as the muted and blind Arndis stumbles off into the forest, Kia tempts Marco along, bringing him closer and closer to the sea and his inevitable doom. But slowly and subtly, Marco slows her down. Professing his love for her, he wants Kia to come back home with him. Wavering, the she-demon turns up the heat but Marco faces this temptation and does not bend. (I guess old Kirk doesn’t believe in pre-marital sex.) The battle lost before it even began, Marco wins the demon over before they make it into the water. (And I guess I was a little pre-mature on the pre-marital sex thing. Kirk shoots, he scores!) Marco's "encounter" with Kia takes a lot out of her. While she sleeps, he carries her back to the village ... Meanwhile, out in the woods, bumping into trees, poor Arndis is still hopelessly lost. Watching what has happened to Kia and Marco, Amael releases Arndis from the spell and guides her after them, hoping the sister can distract Marco before it's too late ... Taking Kia into the church, Marco lays her on the altar. When the church bell awakens her, the frightened and overwhelmed demon bolts from the holy sanctuary, leaving a befuddled Marco behind. 

Catching up to the defiled Kia, a livid Amael charges her sister demon to avenge this holy rape. She agrees, and to do this, they must summon an Incubus to help her gain revenge. Back at the church, Arndis finally feels her way inside and is united with her brother. After exchanging "What a shitty day I had" stories, Marco ends his by admitting that he still loves the strange girl.

Meanwhile, deep in the forest, Amael and Kia go to an abandoned house and summon the "Lord of the Night" and beg him to send an Incubus to avenge his defiled disciple. When the monster squeals in agreement, the ground trembles until it's torn asunder, allowing the Incubus (Milos Milos -- gesundheidt!) to emerge out of the cracked earth. Ready to do their bidding, and since they can't touch the pure Marco, the she-demon decides to take it out on the sister. (Well, that doesn't seem fair?) And after Kia lures Marco away from the farm again, Arndis is seduced and captured by the Incubus and taken to the abandoned house, and while the coven performs a Black Mass, the Incubus rapes her. (Boo! Hiss! Boo! Leave her alone!)

Elsewhere, on the path to the beach, Marco keeps calling for Kia but can’t catch up to her. Suckering him all the way to the water's edge this time, Kia soon finds that she can’t go through with it and hides. Seems she loves him, too. Unable to find the girl, Marco heads back home. Upon arrival, he finds the ravaged and discarded body of his sister, but before Arndis expires, she warns him to save himself because Amael and the Incubus are there for him, too!

They fight, but the demon clearly has the upper hand and Marco is severely wounded in the scuffle. But just as the Incubus is about to finish him off, Amael steps in and orders the demon to stop and let Marco kill him -- thus corrupting his soul. When the Incubus complies, Marco falls into their trap just as Kia arrives, and with the demon dead at his feet, Amael offers the now fallible Marco to Kia to do with as she pleases.

Once more, Kia leads the now delusional, and mortally wounded, Marco toward the sea (-- giving a patented Kirk speech the whole way about the horrors of hell he now sees). But Marco realizes that this path isn’t right and stops. Realizing he must cleanse his soul before he dies, he makes a u-turn and heads for the church. Kia tries to go after him, but Amael stops her and they have a brief catfight until Kia knocks her on the noggin' and escapes. Having had enough of the both of them, Amael removes the stake from the Incubus' heart, resurrecting him, and then sends him to destroy Kia.

Marco, meanwhile, makes it into the church, but the Incubus catches Kia before she can get inside. Denouncing the devil, she makes the sign of the cross, causing the Incubus to revert to its true demon form. (A real live goat!) As they engage in hand to hoof combat, and though the goat seems to have the upper hand, Kia manages to get away when Marco pulls her into the sanctuary and safety, where they finally embrace.

Do you all remember Count Floyd’s Monster Chiller Horror Theater from SCTV? If not, he was the host of a cut-rate Creature Feature program whose films usually weren’t all that scary -- except for Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Stewardesses, starring the legendary Woody Tobias Jr. -- that his thrifty programming department saddled him with. (The same programming department that sealed the fate of Joe Bob Briggs and TNT's Monstervision, apparently.) Anyways, you got the impression that Floyd (played hysterically by Joe Flaherty) drew the short straw among the stations' production assistants and got stuck in the vampire cape. He really didn’t want to be there, and neither did his studio audience. Getting to the point -- and there is one, trust me -- one episode in particular found Floyd thinking he finally had a real horror movie: a werewolf picture called The Lair of the White Wolf. Promising thrills and chills during the bumper, the host then tosses it over to the film with his customary wolf-howl. But as the credits roll, we find out it's Ingmar Bergman’s The Lair of the White Wolf, and the entire first segment is nothing but two women talking in circles in subtitled Swedish while the camera constantly moves to randomly juxtaposition them. Then, at the first commercial break, we cut to an unsuspecting Floyd who is cursing and yelling at the stagehands over which idiot dug up this over-cooked Swedish meatball -- until it quickly dawns on him that he's live; he then clumsily recovers by going into a howl followed by mock praise of this not-so-scary film. Swearing that it'll get better, when the entire movie proves nothing but the women talking, during each break, Floyd is still swearing -- a lot. He also swears that a werewolf appeared at the window during one scene -- "Didn’t you see it! With the bloody fangs, and burning eyes! ...Oh, forget it."

Contrary to most reports, Incubus was not the only film shot in Esperanto, nor was it the first; a French crime film, Angoroj (The Agonies), beat into theaters by almost a year. Stevens' film did become somewhat of an obscure darling in art house circles and had a successful run in France after it failed to find a distributor stateside. At one point, Stevens was even willing to re-cut and re-dub the film in English and insert some nudity in an attempt to land a deal, but it never materialized. And when all the prints and original negatives were either lost or destroyed in a mix-up at the film processing lab, Incubus faded into a obscurity, an odd fever dream that few remembered clearly -- except for Stevens and assistant producer, Anthony Taylor. Thinking their film to be lost forever, after years of searching, Taylor found a single, brittle copy at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 1996. And after a careful restoration co-funded by the Sci-Fi Channel, hoping to cash in on the built in audience of its star and his early [and embarrassing] career choices, Incubus was finally released on video and DVD in 2001 to a new generation of oddball cinema fans.

And once you do see it, you can easily see the film's higher art appeal. With an eye for weird angles, shadowy corners, and startling close-ups, Hall's cinematography is beautiful and matches the mood of the film from scene to scene quite brilliantly. Stevens' staging and blocking is very European and oozes pretentiousness, and when you add the Esperanto on top of that the audience is knocked off kilter from the get go and is never allowed to catch up. Hall would go on to be nominated for four Academy Awards over the next five years, winning once for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As for Stevens, he would mainly stick to television after the film went bust, serving as a supervising producer on many 1970's sci-fi staples like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. As for their star, Shatner is fine as Marco; it’s just hard to absorb after seeing him in everything he’s done since. (There are plenty of Prime Directive jokes to be made here.) And aside from the whole Count Floyd thing, the strongest emotion the film got out of me was that I really felt sorry for poor Arndis, who didn't deserve the amount of abuse heaped upon her ... I have a real problem with these morality tales, especially in episodic TV, where horrible things happen to other people around the protagonist to teach them a hard life-lesson that I find cheap and lazy. And on a sad note, actress Atmar committed suicide not long after the film's completion. Equally tragic is the tale of Milos Milos, who went on to murder his girlfriend, Barbara Ann Thompson, the estranged wife of Mickey Rooney, before killing himself. And it only gets more bizarre from there. Check out this website dedicated to the The Curse of Incubus for all the strange and sordid details.

Sure, but that really depends on your relative definition of good. No matter how odd it gets, the film is beautiful to look at and it is very entertaining because it pushes well beyond these oddball boundaries into some kind of wonderful delirium. But does it push things far enough to be considered high art? Well, I’ve always thought that art was art and crap was crap, and never the two shall meet, and no matter how pretentious it tries to be, in any language, Incubus can’t quite shake its wonky origins.