in a global community not long ago, there was a group of people who decided that they needed to create a new language. one that had no historical background and simplified to very basic syllables. this amalgamation of language was dubbed esperanto and serious people went about trying to promote it as the new universal language. esperanto. it sounds like a new dance step.

in 1965, someone felt that it was absolutely necessary to create a complete feature-length film using only esperanto. this movie would be titled incubus. the real prize in incubus comes merely as a wacky surprise to the already bizarre narrative involving a beautiful sucubus named like the car company kia, but pronounced differently. kia wants to seduce a man whose soul is as pure as the driven snow and she happens to find him living in the middle of the woods in the shape of william shatner. if there's one thing that this movie manages to accomplish is that even in the pre-star trek days, it was william shatner who carried the show.

so, there you have it, william whatner speaking esperanto to a tunic-clad sucubus. she wants his soul, but he's too dedicated to his demented little sister. during the eclipse he tells little sis to not look at the sun. of course she looks at the sun and it's nothing but trouble from there on out. enter stage left - demons, satanic rituals, evil nuns and goats. with all the excitement floating about, incubus turns out to be a much funnier movie than one would think. the pacing of the esperanto gives it the perfect surreal mood that david lynch was only aspiring to achieve. william shatner gives a great shakespearean esperanto performance and the cinematography is classic star trek despite the fact that it predates the sci-fi love boat by four years. bad choreography and the true lack of ability to actually fight lends its own taste of the star trek universe to the low production values of incubus.

one word of warning: there is a lot of walking. it appears as if esperanto can only fill so many pages worth of script, regardless of whether you double-space or not. so, to make up for the lack of dialogue, there are plenty of scenes of walking. there's walking with couples, walking alone, walking along fields, walking down to the sea and walking to follow the other people who are walking. if you're limited on time or you don't have enough liquor to last the whole 75 minutes, it might behoove you to fast forward through the walking scenes. you'll be duly rewarded at the end with the fantastic scene of the sucubus wrestling the stuffed goat, definitely a classic scene not to be missed.

unfortunately, you probably won't be able to find Incubus at your local corner video store. at the moment it seems to be only available through the web at www.incubusthefilm.com. Got that? Good.