Review: Prince of Darkness

Priest Donald Pleasence investigates a colleague’s death and comes across a secret religious sect known as the Brotherhood of Sleep (an off-shoot of the Catholic Church), and a strange, giant glowing canister housed in the basement of St Goddard’s church. He calls Victor Wong, a quantum physics professor who brings along several students (all of different scientific and language disciplines) to investigate. What they uncover will change what Pleasence and everyone else had believed about that little ‘ol book called The Bible. It’s not long before the liquid (essentially Satan in liquefied form, or an ‘Anti-God’ as Wong posits) inside the canister has gotten out and starts infecting everyone. Meanwhile, a horde or derelicts (who I like to refer to as Satan’s Bums, a perfect title for the film- what?) is amassing outside eerily, with Alice Cooper among them. Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount play two of the students who are an item, whilst Dennis Dun is the resident horny smart-arse, and Peter Jason is another professor.

 

This 1987 film from writer-director John Carpenter (“Halloween”, “Big Trouble in Little China”, “The Thing”, “Memoirs of an Invisible Man”) is one of those films you wish you liked more than you actually do. It’s probably his most disappointing film, because I can see how this material could’ve ended up being a lot of fun. It just isn’t. The score by Carpenter and Alan Howarth is simplistic but effective and really, really cool. Best of all is the top-notch cinematography by Gary B. Kibbe (“They Live”, “In the Mouth of Madness”), which perfectly captures the eerie, on-the-verge-of-apocalypse world-view of the story. The view of homeless people in the film is certainly on-the-nose, but it’s still great stuff from an atmospheric perspective- I love how still they are and how slowly they grow in number outside.

 

The film is atmospheric and apocalyptic for the first hour or so. Unfortunately, Carpenter has tried to make a Hammer horror film (note that his pseudonym as screenwriter is Martin Quatermass), and he doesn’t quite pull the whole thing off. Firstly, Carpenter fails to give an adequate humanoid antithesis to the forces of ‘Good’ represented that are represented by Pleasence and Wong (and to a lesser extent, Peter Jason, who is solid). A stronger human conduit or instrument in the service of evil would’ve helped this film enormously. If you’re gonna call a film “Prince of Darkness”, you really ought not disappoint in giving us an effective Prince of Darkness himself. What we get instead is a glowing green ooze and the cast slowly being possessed/killed by it.

 

Also, the cast are a mixed bag. Pleasence and Wong are ideal, Peter Jason is always fun too. But the other cast members? Yikes. These actors, with the exception of likeable Dennis Dun (who still ranks a distant third behind Wong and Pleasence), are boring, lacking charisma, and playing roles with no depth or distinction. The lack of depth is largely indicative of a script with way too many characters to keep track of, something that not even a high body count is able to fix. It’s one of the biggest issues I also had with “The Thing”. The characters here didn’t really ‘pop’, especially the romantic leads played by Parker and Lisa Blount, both miscast as science students and far too old for their roles too. Pleasence and Wong are not in it enough to compensate for the dead weight brought by the younger set. I was particularly aghast at the African-American character who sets such cultural representations back a good fifty years in one scene where he belts out ‘Amazing Grace’ in his best Paul Robeson baritone. Poor Jessie Lawrence Ferguson (who died in 2019) didn’t have a chance with that role. If the film lacks a strong villain and most of the protagonists are dull, why should one become invested in the story? The film’s climax plays out like the bulk of “The Thing” (only without Rob Bottin’s amazing, yet show-off FX), with people being possessed one by one and turning on each other. That’s not a compliment, as I wasn’t a fan of that film. The makeup isn’t bad, I’ll give it that, especially for a modest budget.

 

I really can’t fault Carpenter’s directorial skills here. He’s crafted an atmospheric and apocalyptic scenario, and he has chosen his sets and locales very, very well. He’s clearly working very bloody hard, with an especially effective opening 25 minutes. However, with dull characters and dull slasher movie plotting, it soon begins to lose your interest. A real mixed bag here. The premise is great, the atmosphere is terrific, there’s a few creepy moments but an uneven disappointment overall.

 

Rating: C+