directed by: Anya Camilleri
starring: Tara Reid, Akemnji Ndifernyan, Alice O'Connell
run time: 84 minutes
available at: Amazon.com

Tara Reid is Jay, who along with her brother Josh and four indistinct old friends ends up on the wrong side of a rural country road barrier when their camping van nearly hits a tree. We don't see the accident occur, instead witnessing a fairly incoherent chase sequence that features two scientists in dark, water-stained corridors constantly interrupted by quick flashes of a bald guy with strange eyes apparently supposed to add to the menace. It's easy to surmise that Jay and friends will somehow end up in the dark place where the scientists went bonkers, so getting there wastes a good ten minutes of viewers' time with insipid attempts to make the cardboard characters seem even remotely memorable. For the record, Holly is dewy-eyed and has a couple braids in her hair, Bug is black, Karen has $500 boots, Josh has some kind of troubled history, Jay is the quiet leader and Peter… Peter is pretty much just there. That's it. This is whom you have to cheer for. Hell, I'd rather root for the Oakland Raiders than this lot.

Incubus does score a point or two for getting the young people into a place they cannot escape, even if the method of entrapment is woefully goofy. Last I checked, new climbing ropes don't just fray and snap under the intense weight of a boyish, 150 pound guy, and if they do… well, I knew there's a good reason I never took up with the hobby.

Once trapped, it is revealed the eerie location is an underground testing facility and soon the Jay-crew stumbles onto the bloody pile of scientists we saw in the prologue. The female scientist has a key on a chain in her mouth. The male scientist has a screwdriver in his eye. Fair trade. The kids take the key and try to get out using the front door, but Jay, now apparently clairvoyant, confirms a guess she made earlier: this is the wrong key.

Then the lights go out, and whoa boy, you better Incu-buckle your seat belts because the next hour will bring you all kinds of… boredom. Paint drying, stuck-in-traffic, C-SPAN style boredom.

Yeah, Josh gets attacked by a rabid scientist in a water-filled basement and the key unlocks the door to a glass room housing our man Baldy from the opening sequence, but you'll be beyond caring when the actual good ideas start showing up in the screenplay. By the time Jay spends a seemingly endless amount of time spouting off exposition about how Baldy is a serial killer that – it was believed - was put to death for, among other things, killing his family and cutting out their tongues, you're tired. Tired of watching endless shots of these Mystery Machine rejects skittishly making their way with failing flashlights through a maze of not-that-dark corridors. Tired of watching them get picked off one after another by the mind-controlling dude in the glass room that looks like the bastard son of Michael Berryman and Persis Khambatta. Tired of watching Tara Reid's Incu-bust which figures prominently in many a shot thanks to her paper-thin blue shirt being less reflective than her glowing white bra. You may even get tired of making bad puns to counter all of this Incu-business.

The fact is Incubus could have been a lot of fun had the screenplay gone through a few more drafts and the action was amped up… or at least shown. At first it seemed a good idea to drop the viewer right into the middle of things post van accident; a potentially more engrossing method to get things kicked off. It soon becomes clear that it was just the filmmakers "playing it safe," as that's the way the whole movie feels. Safe. Boring. Undercooked.

The idea that the serial killer's death was faked so amoral scientists could use him as a guinea pig is a solid premise, and the addition of his penchant for out-of-body experiences also has potential. Additionally, carrying that notion one step further by allowing the killer to possess others should have made this a riveting, claustrophobic thriller as now friends could turn on friends. What could have been a retake on The Thing or Invasion of the Body Snatchers instead felt like an overlong sci-fi channel movie with less cheese factor, despite Tara Reid's mule-like sobbing trying to up the ante.

It's all just too bad, really. Reid has shown in the past she can actually act with nice turns in Girl (with Dominique Swain) and Body Shots, but due to her off-the-set E Wild-on-ness, it appears she's relegated to this sort of fare and simply gives what the material deserves and nothing more. At one point she even utters a line so fast that "auxiliary generator" becomes "auxilerator," which woke me briefly from the dull trance I was falling under.

Director Anya Camilleri appears to have several UK television show credits which might explain the stilted vibe of the proceedings. The scenes are staged with little energy, the acting at times not just flat, but inappropriate. When a character bites off a bit of his own tongue, thus proving Jay's wild theories about Baldy's body-leaping capabilities, the reaction of the bystanders bears more resemblance to uncontrolled laughter than fear. And the excellent location, (which finds Bucharest doubling for Northern California in one of the more odd substitutions you're likely to come across), is wasted, never as creepy as it is just dank, (sort of) dark and dirty. It's possible that none of this is truly Camilleri's fault – the movie's small byline in cinematic history is that it's the first ever to premiere online. Perhaps the good people at AOL, which hosted the release, demanded a "clean, safe horror picture."

That said… the movie even ending up with the title Incubus is odd, as one traditionally associates that word with either a type of male demon that sexually violates women or William Shatner's 1965 Esperanto-language debacle that violates everyone. The word generally does carry a frightening-yet-erotic context, something that apparently was lost on the moviemakers until they attempted to shoehorn in a bizarre sequence near the tail end of the picture where Reid awakens in a bed of white sheets writhing in ecstasy. Jesus, if you think she sounds like a mule when she sobs… well, I'll let you figure the rest. Let's just say the working titles for this picture, including Nightmares and Heart Stoppers would have been both more appropriate and more AOL-friendly.

Finally, and tangentially related, a quick mention should be made about the back-story motivating villainous Baldy. In probably the only unsettling moment in the picture, the young psychopath – with mop top and wide-eyed Dickensian innocence – is assailed by his diseased-looking mother who uses a spindly, coarse copper pipe cleaner of sorts to clean out his mouth. It'll make you squirm, as the kid appears to be no older than eight or nine years old and, a moment later, starts spitting up pieces of his tongue. It was reported shortly after the release of 2008's The Reader that the young star of that film, David Kross, was only seventeen years old during most of the film's production, thus necessitating a break so the boy could legally do his sex scene with Golden Globe winning exhibitionist Kate Winslet. So let's get this straight: it's OK to simulate the torture of a seven year-old, but not OK for an almost "of age" lad to simulate sex with one of the world's hottest actresses. This is the kind of logic that ends a species.

The cinematic landscape, forever littered with the detritus of many good ideas ruined by poor execution, has caught another piece of garbage in Incubus. What should have been a taught thriller Incu-bustling with action and surprises became an Incu-bus-ride into boredom.