INCUBUS

OOOH MATRON. CONTAINS SPOILERS

Another nonsensical, uninteresting, strictly routine horror movie in which a bunch of dimwits wander round a spooky old building and bad things happen to them. There are no surprises in store and the only involvement you can muster up as a viewer is to guess which of these lamebrains is going to die next, and how. Only to discover that it really isn't worth the effort since the entire movie is based on utter implausibility and isn't even particularly well done.

Following a car smash, six friends strike out through the woods (rather than heading back to the road they've just left, for no adequately explored reason) and chance upon a derelict building. They can't get in so get onto the roof and abseil down through the skylight (except one, who runs off on her own back into the unlit, unfamiliar woods and disappears from proceedings) where they find two corpses, all the doors and windows sealed from within, and a near-naked bald man strapped to a chair, asleep, and surrounded by banks of monitors and readouts. Who is he and what was being done to him? And what will he do to them?

Not much, unfortunately. Incubus is frankly the usual glum, dark twaddle: the potential horrors of the abandoned hospital set are barely exploited, the plot demands that one of the group is a top-flight medical student who can work out exactly what's going on, and you're never made to care whether any of them survive or not. It's not offensively terrible, it's just utterly pointless. Apart from Tara Reid, the cast are mostly British actors - Casualty, The Bill etc - playing American, and it's shot in Romania, which is also pretending to be America. Apparently this was the first movie to premiere direct-to-download. Whoopee.

*