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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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6
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5 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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This
is the middle section of John Carpenter's self-styled
"Apocalypse Trilogy"; The
Thing (1982) and In
the Mouth of Madness (1995) comprise the bookends.
In its blend of science fiction and the supernatural
the film is an affectionate
if not entirely successful
nod to the 1968 Hammer film Quatermass
and the Pit. (Carpenter wrote the script under
the alias "Martin Quatermass".)
An
elderly, reclusive Catholic priest dies in his
bed, clutching a small silver box. The Vatican
sends an English padre, Father Loomis (Carpenter
favorite Donald Pleasence, playing the twin brother
of his Halloween character,
perhaps?), to investigate.
Loomis learns that the box holds the only key
to a locked door within an abandoned church in
Los Angeles. The dead priest's diary reveals that
he was the keeper of the Holy See's greatest,
oldest secret which
lies waiting, hidden behind that locked door.
Father Loomis uses
the key and emerges a shaken man. He immediately
contacts a former acquaintance, Prof. Birack (Victor
Wong), a prominent academician in the field
of theoretical physics. The clergyman asks Birak
for help, taking him to the church to show the
professor what fills him with fear for the fate
of all Mankind.
A secret
sect of priests, The Brotherhood of Sleep, have
for nearly 2,000 years acted as guardians of a
strange canister, one not fashioned by human hands.
Within swirls a glowing green ectoplasmic fluid
which, according to the lore of The Brotherhood,
is the liquid essence of Satan himself.
Sensing that a time of apocalyptic doom is coming,
Loomis implores Birack to apply scientific methods
to discover the true nature of the stuff. The
professor assembles a team of his top graduate
students to begin an immediate investigation.
They're joined in the task by other specialists
from the university, in various scientific disciplines
and even ancient languages (to attempt a translation
of The Brotherhood's heretical tome). Their research
hasn't even really begun when weird things begin
happening in and around the church. The building
is surrounded by a crowd of zombie-like homeless
people (led by legendary shock rocker Alice Cooper)
and worms are seen crawling up the windows.
More astonishing, though, are the team's initial
findings. The canister is millions of years
old, and can only be opened from the inside...
The plot
of Prince of Darkness
can get pretty far out. There's talk of antimatter,
Tachyon Beam broadcasts from the future and an
extraterrestrial Jesus appearing on Earth to warn
humanity about the coming of the "Anti-God",
Satan's father. Lest this mumbo jumbo devolve
into the cinematic equivalent of a stoner bull
session, Carpenter threads his trippy scenario
with old-fashioned haunted house thrills. The
evil goo is eventually loosed and begins infecting
the researchers one by one. Some are 'demonically'
possessed while others are killed to be resurrected
as zombies. One guy is brutally stabbed and then
turned into a ghostly revenant composed mostly
of cockroaches (!). Given the wild nature of the
story and situations, Carpenter smartly
relies on an ensemble cast laced with capable
actors he's used before and since. Along with
Pleasance there's Big Trouble
in Little China's Wong and Dennis Dun, plus
Peter Jason, who appeared in six Carpenter projects
after this. The characters of Brian (Jameson Parker
of TV's Simon & Simon) and Catherine
(Dead & Buried's
Lisa Blount), grad students who begin a tentative
romance just as the horror begins to unfold, are
central to the story but sketchily written; nevertheless
they're effectively played and never bog down
the inexorable excursion into mayhem that Carpenter
has planned for us.
A number
of critics have pooh-poohed Carpenter's films
in general for starting out strong and then falling
apart in the third act. I tend to dismiss this
assessment... but am forced to agree in the case
of Prince
of Darkness. A mood
of encroaching evil, invisible yet tangible, is
firmly established in the opening minutes, skillfully
maintained and gradually heightened until the
final half hour. (Carpenter's electronic score
one of his eeriest
provides an unnerving
sonic representation of this malevolent miasma
as the characters gradually discover what is happening.)
At this point the film moves into siege mode,
with Loomis, Birack and the surviving researchers
trapped in the church by the homicidal vagrants
outside and attacked by their possessed/resurrected
colleagues within. Here the director is on very
familiar ground, expertly ramping up the tension.
Where the film blows it is in the key scenes involving
the physical manifestation of this 'Liquefied
Satan'. A chick with an Evil
Dead complexion in a bad blonde wig, croaking
"Faaaaather!" into a mirror, comes as
a serious letdown. (In contrast, the simply-fashioned
"dream messages" that plague all who
fall asleep within a certain radius of the canister
are extraordinarily creepy.)
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Prince of Darkness
was initially released on DVD by Image in an edition
that has since gone OOP. In October 2003, Universal
the film's original
theatrical distributor
issued its own version. It's a bare-bones affair
with only the trailer for an extra, but offers
a commendable anamorphic widescreen print in the
proper 2.35:1 aspect ratio and a solid, if unremarkable,
Dolby 2.0 Surround audio mix. (It cannot be overly
stressed how absolutely essential it is to view
John Carpenter's films in their correct AR.)
2/04/05
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