Horror Movie Review: Incubus (2006)

Just because you’re making a horror movie that has your cast being killed off in gruesome ways shouldn’t mean you put the bare minimum effort into making them interesting characters. The best horror movies are often the ones where you care about those in peril. Incubus is not one of those movies.

The opening of the movie is pretty interesting as we see a laboratory descend into chaos for unknown reasons. It’s frantic, a little bit frightening and bloody. Sadly, it is all downhill afterwards.

We meet our walking band of dead meat as they stand next to their over-turned car. They’re in the mountains of Montana and night is falling so they head into the woods to find shelter from the cold. Every single one of these characters are utterly forgettable except Jay-Jay and that is only because she is played by a familiar face…Tara Reid. Hardly a glowing reason to watch the movie.

The group end up stumbling across a facility and find a skylight that leads to an underground laboratory. Some of the group are against going down but the cold weather ends up being the decider. The group (baring one who runs away) go down but the rope they used breaks trapping them inside. This happens to be the same lab from the start of the movie and it’s not long before the group find bodies.

A major problem but not the biggest as they also find an alive scientist who has gone a bit mad. As well as a serial killer who is in a coma.

It turns out that the scientists in this lab were conducting experiments on the killer and he can now enter people’s dreams. Once inside he can take over their mind and start killing again. The group don’t just have to find a way out now. They also need to make sure they don’t fall asleep.

It’s not the worst story but is played out so lazily and makes it unnecessarily complicated. So much so that we have to have a lengthy scene where Jay-Jay explains exactly what is going on. All of which she read in files, of course.

That’s not the worst of it though, not by a long shot. The script for this movie could have been Schindler’s List but this lacklustre cast would have still made it seem like trash. Every single scene is dragged down by some of the most bored acting you’ll ever see in a horror movie. That the one scene that sticks in the mind is two characters trying to act sad over a friend’s death and failing says just how impactful this movie is.

Not even hefty gore and a decent looking location can turn this turd into a diamond. If you make it to the end, you’re not rewarded for your patience. The ending is as dumb as the rest of the movie is.