There was (and still is) a website called WrestleCrap, devoted to chronicling the most audaciously bad moments in professional wrestling history. And while the site presented a slate of offerings from WWE, WCW, and ECW, the big companies of the time, it deliberately left out any entries for the independent wrestling scene, the kind of small-time operations that put on shows in bingo halls and VFWs. The site offered a little explainer for this, but the reasons were clear. It’s fair to take aim at well-financed operations full of professionals putting out ill-conceived or substandard products. It’s churlish, on the other hand, to skewer unpolished small-timers who are doing what they can to get a modicum of attention from fickle crowds. One is fair game. The other is punching down. That sums up how I feel about 2010’s *The Incubus*. It is by no means a good film. To the point, if you enjoy movies that are so comically terrible they wrap back around to being riotously entertaining, this movie more than fits the bill. The acting is unpolished; the plotting makes little-to-no sense, and there is an unrestrained garishness to the whole thing that puts the film squarely into “entertaining bad” territory rather than “boring bad” territory. But it is also a glorified student film, whose creative lead is a nineteen-year-old girl living out her fanfic dreams. This is not a serious picture. And but for a local Weight Watchers patron, an attendant infusion of some real money, and some regional news coverage, it would likely be forgotten among the litany of ramshackle productions that largely exist to fulfill the dreams or feed the egos of a small creative teams, rather than passed around the bad movie watching faithful. Which is all to say that I can't bring myself to give this film a real critical analysis it was never meant to withstand. *The Incubus*’s love interest is a young man from the Czech Republic with all the emotive range of a text-to-speech app from 1996, and by god, he makes you yearn for the misaimed but go-for-broke energy of no less a thespian than Tommy Wiseau. Given the high volume, romantic tension at play here, and the accent and stylings of its monster boyfriend, you wouldn't be wrong if your mind turned to [*The Room*](https://trakt.tv/comments/276982) while watching this film. While I would never suggest that *The Room* is ripe for a serious analytical deep dive, it is also kind of incredible. It is the work of a true auteur, in the [*Ed Wood*](https://trakt.tv/comments/78382)ian sense of representing one filmmaker’s unfiltered vision. It is a singular film, the kind that's mesmerizing as the product of what aliens might try to make if they learned third hand about human emotions and entertainment. And not for nothing, while there’s reason to be wary of the sense that Wiseau might not be all there, he’s also a fully-grown adult, who treats his self-funded output with a certain haughty self-importance. There are also reports that he may not be the greatest guy when the cameras aren’t rolling. All of which makes it easier to laugh more comfortably at the excesses of ill-considered, ego-fluffing release. *The Incubus*, on the other hand, is more akin to Rebecca Black’s infamous “Friday” music video: a piece of outsider art that's undeniably below par and liable to provoke chuckles, but also the product of earnest kids doing their best to replicate popular entertainment, however unsuccessfully. There are home movies of my sibling and I “putting on a show” in ways no less earnest or ridiculous. If you’d given me $300,000 to make a movie at nineteen, I’d have leapt at the chance and would be hard-pressed to produce better results. I’m in no position to cast the first stone here, however tempting it might seem. What I will do is take a minute to talk about what’s good and even promising in *The Incubus*. The most significant is that the concept isn’t half bad. As much this film is an obvious *Twilight* knockoff, as supernatural teen romances go, this one has a better central conceit than most. The notion that incubi are incapable of feeling emotions, but that dreamy Rafael finds himself beginning to experience them again when he’s around our protagonist, Marnie, is a compelling hook for their otherwise unavailing romance. It provides a preternatural spark to their connection, and while the execution is less than great, creates some tension from how they’re inexorably drawn to one another, but given the incubi’s life force-draining tendencies, also creates a certain inherent danger when they’re together. Hell, there’s even something fascinating about Bianca, the evil head of the incubi, warning her charges off from indulging in these green shoots of feeling once more, as a means of controlling them. In defter hands, you could see the concept tackled with depth and make a genuine statement about two people from different kinds of abusive households finding solace in one another. (Here’s where I’ll offer my crazy, baseless conspiracy theory. This is roughly the concept of the video game *Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days*, which came out just a year before this film did, and also features gaudy costumes and some melodramatic, though moving, deaths. *Twilight* is the obvious influence here, but the parallels were enough to catch my eye.) Likewise, as rough as the cinematography is here, the production takes some big swings! At one point, Marnie thanks her best friend for a “damn good cup of coffee.” And deliberate homage or not, the sequence where Rafael advances on Marnie while she dreams, with the room’s lighting alternating flashes of pink and blue in the darkness is artsy in the vein of something you might find in *Twin Peaks*. Many of them don’t work, but there’s plenty of adventurous shots here that are clearly going for something, even if their reach exceeds their grasp, in a way I think David Lynch would appreciate. To the point, most of the performances here are profoundly amateurish, but in a way that's not terribly interesting, but a few of the actors really go for it in a way that's both memorable and admirable. There’s a comic disconnect between Rafael the incubus supposedly discovering his passion again while he speaks his dialogue as though he’s reading a takeout menu. Baddie Bianca delivers nonsensical, faux-philosophical verbiage with such conviction that it wraps back around to being funny. And one of Marnie’s friends delivers line-reads with such odd inflections that you’ll wonder if she’s ever spoken words before. But for the most part, the rough acting is pretty standard for untrained performers doing their best to imitate what they see from Hollywood without the chops to meet that standard. But Marnie’s best bud, the lazily-named Johnny Johnson who is a kind of His Xander Harris by way of Billie Joe Armstrong, really goes for it. The young actor offers a performance that is constantly extra and sometimes bizarre but never boring, and is one of film’s few characters who seems to understand what kind of movie he’s in. But even he pales in comparison to the (grown-up) actor who plays Walter, Marnie’s abusive uncle. He’s a cross between the dad from [*Mallrats*](https://trakt.tv/comments/797540) and the mom from *Carrie*, and by god, he goes for broke in every single moment he’s on-screen. The actor gesticulates and exaggerates and chews every piece of scenery available. It is, shall we say, not a traditional performance by any means, but it’s the film’s most energetic and distinctive, and if nothing else, the actor clearly understood the assignment. You could also be forgiven for laughing through every second of it. I’m not here to yuck anybody’s yum. I will not deny the supremely comic (if cringe-worthy) charms of watching a dimestore Chappell Roan live out her erotic friend fiction on the big screen. This is assuredly a film worthy of entertaining you and your friends on your next bad movie night. And given the earned media the film’s creator and star generated on the novelty of its behind-the-scenes story, and the local South Florida McMansion setting of its scenes, you might also reasonably scoff at *The Incubus* as a spoiled suburban vanity project. And yet, as with *The Room*, part of the glory and joy of a project like this one is a certain mix of being impressed and flabbergasted that this movie even exists. I cannot pretend *The Incubus* is a quality film. But I also struggle to see it as anything but a young, unpolished talent’s first fumbling effort to make real art, with the unexpected boon of a benefactor who can make that dream a reality. Most of our dreams end up on the cutting room floor. I’ll assuredly laugh, but I can't bring myself to throw too many stones at this one.