PRINCE OF DARKNESS
Would Joe Bob refer to "Bicycle-fu"?
John Carpenter, who came thiiiiiiiiis close to going on a shooting rampage after the studios fucked with the big-budget projects he directed for them, flipped 'em the bird instead (phew!) and went back to making low-budget movies where nobody told him what to do. Good on ya, John, even though you went out and made Memoirs Of An Invisible Man for Warner Bros. five years later.
Had I been actually seeing horror movies when this came out (I was 13, and mean ol' mom & dad wouldn't let me see R-rated movies til I was 16) (sniff...I need to call my therapist now) and had I the knowledge of Carpenter's career that I have now, this movie would have worried me about the guy. This is the kind of movie somebody makes when they have about six months left to live, or intend to kill themselves within that general span of time. Incorporating elements of just about every Carpenter movie that had previously been made, Prince Of Darkness is like a one-movie retrospective of his career, circa 1987, at any rate.
Just look at what it lifts from his previous films: the urban decay of Assault On Precinct 13 and Escape From New York, the situation of familiar people overcome and domination by an alien force, from The Thing. Many shots and scare situations from Halloween. The heroes under siege by mindless drones, from both Halloween and Assault On Precinct 13. Forces form ages past come to wreak havoc on the present, from The Fog, Halloween, and The Thing. A priest holding the key to said threat, from The Fog. Salvation from the stars, from Starman. (I don't see a lot of Christine or Big Trouble In Little China here, though, and I never did see Someone's Watching Me or Elvis)
Am I saying he's plagiarizing himself? No, just that with this film (which he wrote under the appropriate pseudonym Martin Quatermass, presumably because of striking similarities between this film and Five Million Years To Earth), Carpenter reached a bit of a turning point in his career. It'd be another eight years before he directed another horror movie, and he'd only put out two sci-fi-ish movies in the interim anyway. It's as if he wanted to put out the one movie that says "This is me", before he went down this different path. Intertextuality, baby!
Prince Of Darkness might just be the most ambitious horror movie I've ever seen. It doesn't always deliver on its incredibly grand premises, but damn, it's hard to watch this movie and not appreciate the effort Carpenter has made. For most horror movies, ambition is defined by the combining of two previously made movies, instead of ripping off just one. Who was it who called the Psycho "re-creation" an experiment? This movie gives ya experimental, if not in technique, then in storytelling. It lends itself to being probed, prodded, and examined from more angles than I could hope to get through in one night. It's, like, deep, man.
Prince Of Darkness poses a good question: if Satan is the Prince of Darkness, then who's the King? Maybe the Bible answers that, hell if I know. Anyway, I've always thought that Satan, a mere fallen angel, was a pretty lame excuse for a Biblical villain. The concept of an Anti-God always struck me as a little scarier.
An elderly priest dies, leaving behind a key and a journal, a journal which tells of his membership in the 2000-year-old Brotherhood Of Sleep, a clandestine Catholic order which has guarded a secret the Vatican never wanted to let out. But it's coming out anyway, and one priest (Donald Pleasance) is terrified by it. It's a redefinition of Christianity, and possibly a death knell for both it and the world it tried to protect.
The priest calls in a way out-there physics professor (Victor Wong) who once engaged in some televised debates with him over some unspecified subjects. The professor is intrigued, and comes to see for himself what's kept in the basement of a 300-year-old church in a decaying section of L.A.. What he finds there impresses and frightens him enough that he assembles a team of his finest students - and a number of other promising pupils from other departments - to investigate.
We've all seen a lot of horror movies which mixed in some science fiction, but usually, it's just in setting; Alien without the spaceship is a simple monster movie. This mixes in as much science as science fiction; the nature of science itself is a key element here. Logic and illogic, possibility and impossibility, consciousness and the unconscious, and the sheer limitations of human understanding, the paradox of paradox resolution. That idea alone is scarier than anything any movie could hope to convey; that humanity has its limits of knowledge and wisdom, and we're brushing up against them.
We are first presented with contradictions that seem fairly simple to imagine there being a solution to. A canister of pre-biotic fluid that can only be opened from the inside, ancient text with differential equations in it, written long before differentials were invented, self-organizing material, lower life forms moving with unknown purpose. Sure, at that point in the film, no character or viewer can explain them, but they seem more a puzzle than an impossibility, something for which there can be a rational explanation; these discoveries won't shatter anybody's perception of the real world enough to send them into therapy. Then the violations of "real world" logic become more flagrant (the dead coming to life, psychokinesis, spooky transmissions moving backward in time, liquid flowing up to the ceiling), inviting no rational explanation at all.
For the bulk of the film, this is all exploited marvelously. The second half stumbles a bit, however, in introducing a "zombie" aspect which doesn't really mesh with the enormous ideas at work here. While the ending has a typically Carpenterian knockout effect, the way it's arrived at is a little disappointing: with neither science nor spirituality, intelligence nor faith, but with two-by-fours and axes. Okay, maybe there's an aspect of love conquering all, I dunno. These lapses would be more serious flaws in a movie that didn't provide more visceral chills, however, and this movie has them. Like when one student almost electronically declares "I have a message for you. And you're not going to like it.", or the slowly assembling dream transmission from the future. (sampled in a song by Edge Of Sanity, I might add)
For lasting effect, Prince Of Darkness has few peers within the Carpenter canon; there are images in the last five minutes that haunt long after you've hit REWIND. And that's not all; Carpenter has always been a director of images, actions and ideas, but with Prince Of Darkness, the man shows that yeah, once in a while, he can really write up a storm. Not all of it works (particularly Dennis Dun's flop-and-die attempts at comic relief), but there's a lot of really memorable dialogue here. "Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level into ghosts and shadows," says the professor. Later, he is counseled to cast aside his "misplaced belief in common sense".
Carpenter's score is one of his best, although I think attempts to lay down a groove (!) in some scenes are misguided. Despite what Pleasance says in one scene, I don't get what kind of changes have happened to the sky, however; for all most people know, that's how L.A. always looks. And the credits give mention of the title song by Alice Cooper (who has a cameo as a creepy homeless person), which doesn't actually show up in the movie (love that song!). Ah, well.
Overall, Prince Of Darkness isn't all it could be, but it's more than just about anything you're likely to see in the next year. And if you don't like it, well, at least you get to see a guy get stabbed with a bicycle. When's the last time you got to see a guy get stabbed with a bicycle?