Where to Even Begin?

When I was in college, this had just been rediscovered. Jen, the managing editor of the Evergreen newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal, saw it, just for the sheer delight of seeing a movie in Esperanto. That starred William Shatner. There really didn't seem to be any other reason, or indeed a need for another reason. The trailer seems to recognize that as well. It encourages us to be bewildered as William Shatner speaks in tongues, and hey, I'm there. Bewilder away. Not only that, but Esperanto as a concept always makes me think of Red Dwarf, because Rimmer is trying and failing to learn it, and that's a happy memory too. Even on top of that, the movie was filmed in and around the Mision de San Antonio de Padua in Middle of Nowhere, California--and I'm pretty sure, looking at it and reading about it, that it's the mission we used to visit when I was a kid. At bare minimum, I've visited it at least once, because I'm sure I visited all of them at least once. But I probably have pictures taken by my dad from one of our trips there.

Hang on. This isn't going to make any sense. So there's this succubus, see. Actually, a pair of them. Sisters. And they've been hanging around, doing their succubus thing. Warping men's souls through their demonic feminine wiles and all that. Just another day in the life of the damned. Only Kia (Allyson Ames) is dissatisfied with the usual pick of sinners. It seems there's no challenge in them, and they taste funny. She wants a saint. A real, genuinely good person of clean and unsullied soul. In short, William Shatner. (Who is playing a guy called Marc, but who is, was, and ever shall be William Shatner.) She takes her leave of her sister, Amael (Eloise Hardt), who warns her that this isn't going to end well. And things go wrong, because Shatner struggles to keep his soul turned toward God. To get her revenge, Kia summons their brother, the titular incubus (Milos Milos), who among other things is to ravage Shatner's sister, Amdis (Ann Atmar), to destroy everything Shatner holds dear. And stuff.

So let us speak, briefly, of Esperanto. Every once in a while, someone gets the idea that, if we all just spoke the same language, the world's problems would totally go away and we'd all live in a world of happiness, sweetness, and light. These people are, of course, deluded. However, one of them--a Jewish ophthalmologist from Bialystok named Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof--came up with a new language in the tail end of the nineteenth century, based on various European languages, which he felt could be a universal second language. Needless to say, this has not worked. However, he did acquire enough attention to it that there are now maybe as many as two million speakers, including a thousand people considered native speakers. Oh, and Hitler declared in Mein Kampf that the Jewish secret cabal planned to get us all to speak Esperanto as . . . um . . . something. It wasn't clear. Stalin was in favour of it and then not. It's had a weird relationship with world leaders. Also, I am given to understand that Shatner's accent, along with everyone else's in the movie, is dreadful.

Not that the movie itself is any great shakes. I mean, I was expecting it to be terrible, and it really isn't. It's by no means good, but it's not terrible. Okay, yes. Everybody seemed to be concentrating more on getting the words out in something approaching coherency than on actually acting, though if Shatner's any judge, it's not as though there's a lot of talent there anyway. I find it bewildering that the cinematographer, Conrad L. Hall, would actually get an Oscar nomination the next year, considering what a mess this one is. The music isn't great. The dialogue seems to have been collected, at least in part, out of a phrase book. That which is not, well, might well come out of the phrase book from that one Monty Python sketch. And apparently the subtitles don't always match up with what the people onscreen are actually saying, which is actually probably not the reason a lot of it doesn't make sense.

There is a belief, true or not, that the production was cursed, and whether you believe in curses or not, the notion is certainly tempting. The reason, for example, that the subtitles appear on big, thick, black bars a third of the way up the screen is that this is from the only extant print, which had French subtitles that could not be removed. The reason it is the only extant print is that all of the others, negative and all, were destroyed shortly after the film's release. The director's production company went bankrupt--though if this film is representative of his works, I see why. Ann Atmar committed suicide--I have no further information on how or why, but on further thought, it's none of my business anyway. Eloise Hardt's daughter was kidnapped a couple of years after filming, with her body found in the Hollywood Hills a few weeks after that. As for Shatner . . . well, I guess the rest of us are cursed, too.