Random Horror Movie Of The Week: Inkubus (2011)

Horror Sub-Genre:  Demons
Year:  2011
Country:  USA
Language:  English
Time:  80 min. (official), version watched 60 min
Tagline:  New Demon, New Nightmare
Conciliation Prize (in place of bonus):  Horror Icon Robert Englund 
Watched:  Streaming Cast From YouTube
Recommendation:  BLAH!
Yes there are spoilers here.

Where to start...with the likes of William Forsythe and Freddy Krueger himself-- Mr. Robert Englund, I had some hopes that this would be a passable demon flick with some geniune chills to it.  It doesn't deliver even one.  Not even the scene where the Inkubus walks into the soon to be closing police station with a severed head allows for any real shock.  

I've seen a number of comparison's to films such as The Traveler, which it is clearly ripping off, and came out just a year prior to this; I found at least one reference to a John Carpenter film, In The Mouth Of Madness. But for me, instantly, it was another Carpenter classic that came flooding to mind with such obviousness it was bit mind blowing that no one has complained about before now.  This film barely disguises that it has stolen the entire plot of his classic 1976 Assault On Precinct 13, with the idea that they would improve it by turning it into a "proper horror film."  The film does have a flimsy frame story (more about that later), but for the most part it starts out with a skeleton crew working the last night shift of a police station that is closing.  Sound familiar?  Something else look familiar?  Check out the tagline--now this film crew is approaching ripping off the truly sacred--they dare step into Craven's Nightmare territory because they were able to get Englund to agree to be in their utterly unoriginal, and badly written, movie?

Instead of a gang of street criminals laying siege to the station after a man who had gotten away from them takes refuge there--we have something like the inverse, a man walks in intending to turn himself in (complete with the above mentioned head) claiming to be a very old demon, seeking out a police detective that had almost gotten the better of him 13 years earlier.  Why on earth would a "skeleton crew" at a closing police station be the place that any entity, immortal or otherwise, go looking for trouble or be arrested, or even ask to use the john?  Why not go the main station, and make a big deal of the whole affair?  And maybe I missed something in regards to the detective on the shift, one Detective Tom Caretti (assayed, and I'm not kidding, by Joey Fantone, formerly on N'Sync)--who is the subject of the frame story--why is he even there?  Why would a closing police station need a detective?? Strange skeleton crew, this...

Perhaps that writer/director Glenn Ciano, who shares a writing a credit with Carl V. Dupré, means to explain Caretti's need to be in the station because of blood covered prisoner in the holding cells--but again, why on earth would such a person be taken to what amounts to basically a closed station.  Especially if he is suspected, as we are told by Caretti's wife Officer Erin Cole (Michelle Ray Smith), of committing a horrific murder.  Things progress when Retired Detective Gil Diamante (Forsythe) shows up after the self-described demon (Englund) does.  We've sat through a series of confessions to murders that span all the way back to the middle ages, and include the Jack The Ripper murders of 1888 in the Whitechapel district of London, and the killing of Elizabeth Short AKA The Black Dahlia, in 1947 Los Angeles--a murder that he says was really his best--the one he enjoyed the most.  Gets about, does this serial killing demon!  A few pallor tricks ensue to convince the station that he is indeed a supernatural being, and then there are a lot of bad, mean spirited looking stares.

As if all of this wasn't enough, there is that frame story mentioned above.  The thing with frame stories, however, is that they are meant to actually frame the action of the story, so that one clearly understands the action of the narrative--in this case the tired, worn out "told from a flashback point of view."  Trouble is that we don't get that frame of reference until it's confusingly added, almost as an afterthought, to the plot of the film.  Turns out Det. Caretti is actually locked up in psych ward and is telling the flashback of the story to a facility doctor, of how his wife gave birth to a demon child, and died as a consequence, all while donning a straight jacket.... So I guess this in the "incubus" part of Inkubus.  Because, apparently, the rest of time, this entity spends far more time enjoying serially killing people, than actually having demonic sex with them.  To add to the confusion, is the retired detective drawn into the story, because he wants revenge.  At first it's not clear why he feels this way.

Well, turns out that the demon has killed his wife in the same fashion as Elizabeth Short (so he says, because she was clearly cut in half, though the real cause of death in her actual murder wasn't vivisection), and there is some vague reference to the detective's son.  In the flashback her killing, which comes off almost as a flashback of a flashback, Englund seems to be directed by Ciano to start behaving like Tony Todd from the Clive Barker directed Candyman (1992)--so the rip offs continue.  Things only get more confusing from here, so I will just stop and say, story wise this is a white hot mess!

Robert Englund is incapable of ever just phoning in a performance, and his performance here is the only thing saving the film from being an utter unwatchable demon flick.  Forsythe is a powerful and well known character actor who has played, with great effect and aplomb, some seriously heavy roles in the past.  However, here, he is just phoning it in, with a few toned down notes from his over-the-top performance in Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, mixed up with what is some of the worst directed scenes of despair I've seen in a film in a long time.  The rest of the film is utterly forgettable.  

Birth/Rebirth of Demon incubus.

Some of the gore is effective, but most of the special effects are laughable at best.  Then there is the issue with the cinematography.  At first I thought it was just a bad upload to YouTube--it is after all a free for watching horror film.  So in trying to find out about DVD releases, it became clear that this was the way the film looked no matter the medium; that the DVD release was a bare bones release with nothing except "play" and "chapter selection" on it and that the film was any thing but "clear" no matter the format viewed.  It is over-lit and has a great deal of camera burn, quite blurred in places--so the picture looks as though the viewer is peering through to bottom of clear glass bottle.  I don't know if this is the result of some type of filter being used--or if it simply a mistake made by an amateurish film crew (both, maybe??).  Finally there is the issue of the running time.  It feels as if some parts of the story are missing--and this could account for it's not being easy follow and doesn't hold together at all.  The IMDb page for the film clearly lists it at 80 minutes, but I can't find anyone who has seen the film at that length.  The film on YouTube is barely an hour long.  Apparently so is the copy found on disc.  Confusion abounds!

Overall--this is a hard to watch mess that is probably permanently incomplete, and the only reason I can find to give it a watch would be as a recommendation  for die hard Robert Englund fans.  For completest's only!  I won't be watching it again.  Well not unless I'm paid!  Cheers!  If anyone is interested, follow the YouTube link here.