The Incubus (not the Shatner one)

The Incubus (1982)

Dir. John Hough

Written by George Franklin, based on the novel by Ray Russell

Starring John Cassavetes, John Ireland, Kerrie Keane, Helen Hughes

Trigger Warning: The following review contains accurate information about a movie which you probably don’t want to know anything about, and may also cause you to question both my judgement as a filmgoer and the general state of my mental health. But it has John Cassavetes in it, so I’m going to go ahead and claim it’s art and make a principled stand that watching and reviewing it was the right thing to do as one of our great nation’s last true high-minded aesthetes. But seriously dawg, I’d skip this one if you’d be the type of person to get offended or upset about things which it would be entirely reasonable to get offended or upset by. I crossed that line long ago, but I’m definitely not better off for it and there’s no reason you should suffer the same fate. Sit this one out and watch a Frank Capra movie or something instead, you’ll be glad you did.

OK! So, for everyone still here, I feel I need to begin by acknowledging that this is my second movie 
in a row which is just in inexcusably bad taste, and I’m worried that it’s starting to seem like I watch 
nothing but skeezy rape flicks. I assure you, nothing could be further from the case! Both this and 
EVIL DEAD TRAP were just random things I threw on without knowing anything much about them,
and by sheer coincidence they both ended up being skeezy rape flicks. Sometimes it just happens 
that way! I’m sure it happens to you all the time. Now, let’s have no more soul-searching about the fact 
that the genre I’ve spent my life studying is so replete with indefensible content that any random two 
movies back-to-back might very well lead us here.

This is very possibly that thing the kids today call problematic, but the bigger problem for the world, 
obviously, is that it’s also just a bad idea from an entertainment perspective. Let’s face it: rape is not 
as fun as murder. It’s just a bummer. Why isn’t murder a bummer too? I dunno bud, but it’s true. 
Nothing kills the good vibes of a wholesome serial killer splatter flick like suddenly dropping some
nasty rape scene in there. It’s no fun, and it’s not as cinematic either; if you show it in lurid detail, 
it’s probably going to be exploitative and repellent, but if you tastefully cut around it, it’s just visually 
dull. Neither option acquits itself well to a visual medium or a good time at the movies. 

THE INCUBUS, at least, takes the bold stance that rape is traumatizing and bad, so hey, look on the 

bright side, it could have been worse. But it sure ain’t any fun to watch. Which is especially inimical 
to this particular film, because of the arguably unwise genre structure it brings to the topic of serial 
rape. There is, of course, a subsection of rape-revenge movies (most notoriously I SPIT ON YOUR 
GRAVE) which present long, graphic rape scenes, but with the arguably good intention of depicting
women rebounding from this trauma and recapturing control of their lives by way of violent revenge. 
And there’s also a strain of movies which use rape and brutality as a way to cultivate our feelings of
apocalyptic hopelessness about the wretchedness of mankind (and men in particular). See: VIRGIN 
SPRINGS, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, SALO. These movies can be tough to watch, but I think 
most people would probably agree that they earn their high level of sadism by taking the subject 
seriously and using it to artistically explore subjects of great pain and relevance.

THE INCUBUS, unfortunately, isn’t one one either of those two categories, a fact which I could have 
probably guessed right off the bat, given that the first line of dialogue is “you bitch!” (and the second 
is, “biiiiitttccccch!”). Instead, it’s your standard sleazy mystery-killer-on-the-loose setup, except (and 
before you continue, remember: I warned you) with brutal rape with a gigantic wang being the method
of murder and John Cassavetes inexplicably being the lead. So it’s a slasher, but with rape. 
Not… great. There is, of course, also a pretty rich tradition of rape movies which are just indefensible,
leering exploitation (not trying to point fingers here, but… like 60% of Japanese movies, and also a
healthy cross section of sleazy euro-horror from the late 60’s and 70’s.*) Thankfully INCUBUS is 
not like that either; the structure makes it more or less unavoidable to show us the “kills,” but they’re 
at least treated as grueling, unpleasant affairs, resolutely unsexy and mercifully absent of any leering
nudity (in fact, for what we’re watching, they’re positively tame in terms of visual content).

So in that sense, this is a little more palatable than it could be. But not much. The subject matter is 

just way too unpleasant to be fun, but way too ludicrous to even remotely make a play for being taken 

seriously, stranding it unsalvageably in the no-man’s-land of B-movie entertainment. And truth be told,

it wouldn’t exactly be a top-tier slasher even without the --shall we say exotic?-- details about the killer.

It’s a little bit stodgy and dry, actually, probably the result of director John Hough’s (THE LEGEND OF

HELL HOUSE, ESCAPE FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN) relative dearth of experience with slashers. 

We actually encountered Hough earlier this year in his kid’s horror film WATCHER IN THE WOODS, 

which shares with this one a similar vaguely dreamy atmosphere and unrushed pace, but is much

better suited for that tone than THE INCUBUS, which by all rights ought to be a meat-and-potatoes 

exploitation slasher.

And I mean, it is a meat-and-potatoes exploitation slasher in structure; there’s a mystery killer stalking 

and murdering local teens, and for some reason it’s up to local doctor John Cassavetes (possibly 

over-beloved indie director of A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, FACES and THE KILLING OF 

A CHINESE BOOKIE, but more recognizable in front of the camera from his acting work in 

ROSEMARY’S BABY and THE DIRTY DOZEN) to unmask the murderer and put a stop to the terror. 

That plot would describe untold hundreds of movies from the 1980s alone, and that similarity is

fundamental, not just superficial. And yet, the details here are decidedly on the strange side.

I mean, it’s weird enough that it stars Cassavetes, who, even a little under a decade away from his

death from alcoholism, is way, way too good for this kind of crap (presumably its primary appeal to

the actor was to add further complication to Le Tigre’s song which queries if he’s a “Genius,

Misogynist, Messiah, Alcoholic?”**). When I saw his name in the credits I figured they’d drag him in

to get his name on the poster and appear in one or two scenes as Father Exposition or the

mostly-unseen villain who gets to make one scenery chewing speech at the end, but nope -- he’s 

absolutely the main character, gamely appearing in scene after scene as if this is a totally normal

movie to appear in. I’m not gonna claim he’s giving the most soul-searing performance of his career,

but he’s certainly not phoning it in, this is definitely real acting, and in fact, it’s one of those times when 

a performance may be so good it’s kind of detrimental to the movie it’s in; he keeps reacting to this 

ridiculous premise with such complicated, evocative expressions bursting with complex inner life that 

I kept figuring he had to be in on it or know more than he was telling, or something. But nope, it’s just a 

regular boring protagonist role like any of these movies would have, it just turns out one of his 

weaknesses as an actor is playing a part this banal with the appropriate degree of dull woodenness.

Anyway, it would be weird enough if it was just a low-grade slasher that starred John Cassavetes for

some reason, and that’s already setting aside the basic even weirder fact that anyone thought it 

would be even remotely acceptable to make a movie where the premise is “it’s a slasher movie where 

the killer murders women by raping them with his giant dong.” But then it also complicates things by 

adding a supernatural angle, suggesting that the “killer” is some kind of psychic-ly manifested monster 

(yes, there is a monster suit at the end, but don't get your hopes up, you see it for about three seconds).

Which springs from the subconscious mind of a local kid. Whose mother was executed as a witch. 

So yeah, there’s also a subplot about historical witches and witch-hunting. And then there’s this whole 

weird meta-thing where one of the murders happens in a movie theater, and then there’s a whole 

subplot about police politics and jurisdiction and suppressed town history and all kinds of other weird 

crap which obviously has no business being in a movie like this. It’s kind of all over the place, plot-wise.

Which is really a polite way of saying, “this was obviously adapted from a somewhat rambling novel by 

someone without a lot of experience writing screenplays,” which, wouldn’t you know it, turns out to be 

exactly the case. As weird as it is that there’s a movie this bizarre and disreputable, it’s even more 

shocking to hear it was adapted from a book --  a published book, in hardcover and everything!-- written 

by Ray Russell (the screenplay was written by a “George Franklin” with only one other TV movie to his 

credit***). Russell wrote the novella and screenplay for MR. SARDONICUS, the Roger Corman Poe 

adaptation THE PREMATURE BURIAL and the William Castle gimmick comedy ZOTZ!, but was 

probably more influential as the senior fiction editor at Playboy magazine from the 50’s to the 70’s, 

where he cultivated young talents like Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, 

and Charles Beaumont, aside from publishing his own work (he even won the prestigious World 

Fantasy Award in 1991 for his horror fiction!). Everyone seems to agree he was a real nice guy who 

helped the careers of some literary greats, but between working at Playboy and writing this, it’s hard 

not to wonder if he maybe didn’t have the most enlightened outlook about women imaginable. The 

gender politics here are absolutely off the charts weird, particularly considering the ending, wherein 

(SPOILERS: it turns out the bitchy ice-queen female journalist [Karrie Keane, SPASAMS and a lot of TV] 

that Cassavetes inevitably wins over… was actually the Incubus all along! She’s the one who’s been 

transforming into a demon and raping women to death. In fact, all the villains in the movie are women

--as are the victims-- and the male detectives turn out to be bungling, useless failures) That’s so 

absolutely batty that it just screams for you to try and find some kind of metaphor in it, but I sure can’t 

figure out what it could possibly be. END SPOILERS)

In fact, I wondered if maybe the book was actually a sly satire on men’s unhealthy fixation with male 

virility that got lost in translation to screen, but it sure doesn’t seem that way; reviewer Will Errickson 

of tor.com writes of the novel:

"More and more women are attacked in gruesome yet quite competently written 
scenes of sexualized violence. What makes these readable, for me at least, is 
that they don’t carry the skeevy, sinister air of voyeurism that some later horror 
writers allowed to seep into their prose describing the same sort of thing; Russell 
doesn’t write like he’s secretly getting off on his scenarios. Sure, they’re tasteless 
and unsettling, but that’s par for the horror course."

That would pretty well describe the movie, too, though the “competently” part is a low bar to clear for 
this genre. It’s, you know, shot respectably enough, all the scenes are in focus, most of the dialogue 
is audible, and it more or less clearly conveys the story it’s trying to tell. That by itself is enough to 
put it comfortably in the top 50% of slasher ever made on a purely technical level. There’s nothing 
here amateurish enough to declare it “incompetent.” But truth be told: even with its crazy tasteless 
premise, meandering magical backstory, intriguing John Cassavetes performance, and off-the-wall 
gender politics, “competent” is about the most effusive I’m able to get about it. Despite everything, it 
manages to be dull and uninspired more than scandalous and button-pushing. As much as I appreciate 
its efforts to avoid turning into an appalling skin flick, this basic premise is fundamentally way too 
outrageous to make a play for respectability, and not independently compelling enough to be worth 
overlooking its flagrant line-crossing.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: there's an extended cameo by the British hair metal band Samson (featuring a pre-Iron-Maiden Bruce Dickinson) in the form of clips from the 1981 Julian Temple double-music-video short film BICEPS OF STEEL, which is for some reason being shown in a movie theater. Why, I do not know, but it's pretty awesome-looking and apparently metaphorically tells the story of the biblical Samson via the tale of a "mystical super-roadie who fights evil orange-jumpsuit-wearing bouncers stopping a rock and roll crowd from having a good time." I can't help but notice it looks way better than this movie.

If it was ever going to work, it probably needed to embrace its inherent tastelessness and go
full PINK FLAMINGOS to find some kind of zen state of campy transgression. Japan might 
have been able to pull it off, I dunno, but it’s hard to imagine how. Or why. When it comes
down to it, the biggest problem with THE INCUBUS, (other than a disappointing lack of spoken 
Esperanto) is that it may just not be a story worth telling. It’s weird, but it’s just not all that 
interesting -- even its inherent unpleasantness lacks a coherent enough point of view to sufficiently 
buoy it as a story. At the end you’re left with a lot of stuff that sounds wild on paper, but doesn’t 
add up to very much of a movie. A lot of baggage in search of a plot.

But hey, maybe the book is better.

*And I’m not even necessarily talking about thoroughly disreputable grindhouse affairs; plenty of classy prestigious films films from this period also contain what today read as shocking rape scenes played for sex appeal. The one that really springs to mind is BLOW-UP, which offers the hero of the film sexually assaulting a woman apropos of nothing, apparently as a fun diversion from the tense central plot. Hitchcock's MARNIE too. So it’s not just the FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED’s of the world.

** This definitely adds credence to the “misogynist, alcoholic” charge more than the other two, but goddam, he’s an arresting and intriguing presence even in garbage like this.

*** I can neither confirm nor deny that this George Franklin was the NFL running back from the late 1970’s or the guy famously convicted and eventually exonerated based on bullshit regression-hypnosis testimony who was probably (but not certainly) one of the inspirations for REGRESSION, nor can I definitively confirm those guys are different George Franklins. But whatever the case, George Franklin, whoever he was, only wrote two screenplays, and based on this one I think that was for the best.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	He is The Destroyer. Pretty generic, unless you  wanna count the rest of the text on this poster as  tagline.
TITLE ACCURACY	Yeah, they not only talk about it but include the famous Fuseli painting.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, of Ray Russell’s 1976 novel
SEQUEL?	No
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	I guess killer-with-a-gimmick, but there is also a slight  dusting of creature feature and possession movie
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	John Cassavetes
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	John Ireland?
NUDITY?	Yeah, Cassavetes checks out his daughter while  she’s showering nude with the door opened, which the  movie seems to think is totally no big deal as long as  he shakes his head philosophically as if to say “nope,  can’t have sex with her, haha!’ Fortunately the rapes themselves are blessedly free  of any leering nudity.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Pretty much the whole movie.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Quite the opposite, an innocent cat gets a newspaper  thrown at it for no reason
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	Seems like it
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Some talk of witchcraft in the town’s past
MADNESS?	One of the victims survives, but is mentally too traumatized  to discuss anything or speak aloud for do anything except  gobble the drugs her male caretakers dose her with to keep  her calm (and presumably take extensive stock of the  yellow wallpaper)
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes
VOYEURISM?	Only a little bit of the killer’s POV
MORAL OF THE STORY	There are lots of books in the world, and you should  really adapt pretty much any of them other than this one.

Evil Dead Trap

Evil Dead Trap (1988) aka Shiryo no wana (死霊の罠)

Dir. Toshiharu Ikeda

Written by Takashi Ishii

Starring Miyuki Ono, Aya Katsuragi, Yuji Honma, Hitomi Kobiyashi

So, you can’t have a Chainsawnukah without some Asian horror, and right from the get-go I was jonesing for some Japanese or Korean shit that would really make me sit up and say, “huh.” I figured that with access to pretty much every major streaming service, it would be no problem to just toss something on when the mood struck me. But then when the mood did strike me, I discovered that there’s an appalling lack of anything even remotely in that vein, and the closest I could get was the Chinese SINGULAR CAY, which turned out to be so spectacularly terrible I had no choice but to write nearly 3,000 words about it and feature it prominently on my website and widely promote my review. That’ll show ‘em. But the lesson was learned; if you want the real thing, you gotta go find the real thing. So I did, I went and found the very first real thing I could, and that was the unpromisingly named EVIL DEAD TRAP. I mean, come on guys, I get that the literal translation of 死霊の罠 is ‘Trap of the Dead Spirits’ (or so says Google translate) and so consequently EVIL DEAD TRAP is a workable English version of that, but here’s the thing, EVIL DEAD is already a thing, and those three words together barely even make sense, let alone meaningfully convey anything about the movie.

So I wasn’t expecting much from this one, it just happened to be the first thing I found that met my low requirement of being A) an Asian horror movie and B) that’s it.

That kind of underestimation was a rookie tactical error, because it left me woefully unprepared for the frenzied assault on my brain which was about to follow. The setup is simple enough: a plucky female reporter unfairly brushed off by her chauvinist colleagues who think she should be covering fluff pieces (remember this unexpected and welcome bit of spunky feminism, because you’ll need it to defend continuing to watch the movie when things get…shall we say problematic later on) decides to investigate a mailed-in snuff film by traveling to an abandoned industrial facility with a cadre of body count colleagues, only to be --totally unexpectedly, there’s really no way to see this sort of thing coming-- menaced by a mystery killer.

That could be any movie. But this isn’t just any more. This is a movie which casually pulls an UN CHIEN ANDALOU on us with no warning at all like five minutes in.* It’s a nasty, dirty, crazy, violent bit of work, the kind of thing that reminds you that while at times it feels a little cheap and easy to joke about Japanese cinema being crazy, holy shit, Japanese cinema really is fucking crazy. This is a movie which has a character delivering some standard movie exposition to a woman while violently raping her. Yes, in order to follow the plot of this movie you’re going to have to be able to pick out the important plot clues in the dialogue of a scene which would comfortably be the most disturbing and boundary-pushing thing in any American movie which came out in 2017. Even the Italians wouldn’t just toss something like this into theaters as if it’s a normal genre movie.

Even so, I’d wager the Italians were very much on the mind of director Toshiharu Ikeda, because unlikely as it sounds, EVIL DEAD TRAP (which, despite the name, features no “dead spirits” and certainly no evil dead of any kind) is unmistakably a giallo. From the intense and sometimes surreal lollipop-colored lighting, to its essential mystery-slasher structure, to its peppy female journalist protagonist, to its crazy improbably reveal of the killer, to its lurid sex and violence, right down to its extremely Goblin-esque… (well, score doesn’t sound quite right. It’s really just one repetitive keyboard run played through various filters. But the feel is right.) It’s frankly stunning that anyone in 1988 --let alone someone in Japan-- was capable of making a giallo this classical, but crazy as it sounds, there’s no denying that it feels almost as distinctly Italian as it does Japanese, sans, perhaps, the vague traces of techno-anxiety which remain an unmistakable through-line of Japanese horror cinema (from THE RING with its killer VHS to PULSE with its ghostly internet; here, embodied by a mysterious snuff film received by our intrepid reporters).

I’m at a loss to say how this happened. Ikeda began his career with the ‘roman porno’ (“romantic pornography,” with quotation marks weighing much more heavily over the first word than the second) ‘pink films’ made by Nikkatsu studios in the 1970s and 80, with titles like ANGEL GUTS: RED PORNO and SEX HUNTER. Which just by itself kinda tells you something of how we got to this point. I mean, remember, Nikkatsu wasn’t some grimy fly-by-night b-movie grindhouse operation… it was Japan’s oldest and most venerable film studio, and one of the biggest studios in the country. They worked with Seijun Suzuki and Shohei Imamura!** They produced some of the biggest action films of the day. And they also produced SEX HUNTER, a movie which I think is nicely summed up in the following quote (warning: trigger warning. No seriously, think long and hard before you continue) by an IMDB user whose literal, no-joke internet handle is fucking “Rapeman13:” Miki's transformation from shy, virginal ballerina to ravenous uber-slut is represented brilliantly as the film swiftly transitions from scenes of Miki gracefully practicing her ballet routines to being bound and suspended from the ceiling expelling a Coke enema from her asshole as her SM trainer leeringly looks on. (IMDB labels it a “drama”)

So, from the mind of the visionary director of that “romantic porno,” now we have a horror movie, and he finally gets a chance to avoid kowtowing so closely to your bourgeois sense of refined high taste like he had to on ANGEL GUTS: RED PORNO. He takes this opportunity to really cut loose on over-the-top violence to the point that it comfortably crosses over from “gritty” to “surreal” right about the time our hero falls through a hole in a first-floor hallway and inexplicably awakens on the roof of the building. From there we have naked impalings, beheadings, strangulations, SAW-style Rube Goldberg deathtraps, burning corpses, and eventually a grueling battle with the killer which gradually escalates from grotesque giallo craziness to out-and-out magical realism (with the ‘realism’ a distant afterthought and possibly even an unintended side effect). Say what you will about EVIL DEAD TRAP’s title and pervasive moral repugnance, but never, ever dare to criticize its moxie.

Just how much moxie are we talking about here? Ikeda actually had the balls to claim he’d never seen EVIL DEAD (I guess the name is just a crazy coincidence) or SUSPIRIA (even though SEX HUNTER is set at a ballet school, and this movie is so stylistically similar it could handily pass as a sequel) and that he hates horror so much he never even watched his finished movie. All of which frankly sound kind of like ridiculous lies, similar to his claim that he became a director because he was sitting in a bar near the studio drinking and mouthing off about how easy it was to be a director, when someone from the company said, “OK do it” and he found himself employed as a director the next day. I have a very strong feeling that there is, at the very least, a bit more to all three of those claims than Ikeda lets on, but hey, you can tell just by watching his film that he’s a guy who knows that a good yarn is a lot more important than a logical one.

And in the horror field, that’s exactly the kind of guy you want to have on board, because by completely abandoning logic and investing wholeheartedly in a frenzy of nightmarish surreality and perverse violence, he crafted something genuinely startling, a truly unique and remarkably potent testimony to the power of that strain of Japanese cinema which just goes there. And even if it had nothing else going for it, it would be worth the ride entirely on the basis of its sporting one of the most colorfully nutty killer reveals in all of slasherdom. That’s an outcome that could only come from the lurid sleaziness of Italy being filtered through the sheer psychosis of Japan, and, well, you see the result. As far as I know, there’s nothing else in the history of cinema quite like it, and that may well be an overall good thing for mankind as a species. But as a truly unique beast, transgressive and bizarre, but also narratively grounded enough to pack a visceral punch, EVIL DEAD TRAP is a gen-u-ine highlight of 80’s Japanese horror cinema.

* Admittedly, Dali and Bunuel actually get to it even quicker, but on a shorter runtime.

*Granted, they fired Suzuki for making his most classic film and weren’t exactly running with the same crew by the time the Roman Pornos started, but still.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a trap, but adding “EVIL DEAD” in there is infuriating dishonest on two levels and doesn’t even make any sense.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	None, or at least I don’t think so (hard to tell, since the credits are not entirely translated)
SEQUEL?	Yes, two sequels, one in 1992 directed by Izo Hasimoto, and another directed by Ikeda in 1993, which bears the alternate title THE BRUTAL INSANITY OF LOVE. That would make a suitable title for a grindcore album, but unfortunately the IMDB reviews say it’s more of a thriller and less of a horror movie than the no-holds-barred craziness of EVIL DEAD TRAP 1 would cause one to hope.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Japan, but Italy in spirit
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, giallo
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, although body count friend #2 Hitmoi Kobayashi was apparently a huge star in the world of pornography (wikipedia has quotes gushing that she was, "one of the icons of Japanese adult cinema history." and "She laid the foundations for the golden age of adult video.”) This appears to be her mainstream genre debut, though any world in which EVIL DEAD TRAP is a “mainstream” movie pretty much reduces the word to utter meaninglessness.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	Yes, two people, alone for all of five minutes, decide to get down and fuck naked on a filthy abandoned factory floor while looking for a snuff film killer. I’ll let you guess how well that works out for them.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes, they have a weird gimp guy who engages in an extended and deeply unpleasant rape scene with one of the girls
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	A snake menaces of the girls, but she should be more worried about the body in the locker nearby.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	Sort of, but a weird one
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Definitely
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yeah, sort of.
VOYEURISM?	Yes, the film begins with a tape straight out of PEEPING TOM, with a first-person-perspective murder
MORAL OF THE STORY	As much as I support this brassy young lady making a commitment to being a tough-as-nails journalist instead of a soft focus morning show celebrity, it’s possible this was not the right moment to get all #ShePersisted on us.