Streaming Availability: Peacock
"You will not be saved by the Holy Ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium."
Prince of Darkness has a lot more ambition than your average scary ghoul movie. It sets out to syncretize theoretical physics with Christian dualism. Please pay attention, there's a lot of set-up here.
This movie imagines that God actually is playing dice (sorry, Einstein). A force, best defined as the Godhead, is controlling every particle on the quantum realm. There is also an evil force, Satan, who is not the chief demon, but rather the son of an Anti-God. The Anti-God is a force of destruction living in an alternate reality of pure antimatter. One of the big questions of modern physics is why there is so little antimatter in our universe, and here's your answer: God did it. Back to Satan, he's not a red guy with horns, instead he's a sentient green liquid in a jar in the basement of a spooky church in Los Angeles. But he still can possess people for his terrible plan to open the door to the Anti-God, destroying our world.
Got all that? I almost wish it had even more detail. Maybe John the Baptist is really the Higgs Boson.
John Carpenter directed and wrote the script for Prince of Darkness, screenplay credit going to a a pseudonym, "Martin Quatermass". That's a reference to Professor Bernard Quatermass, a recurring British scientist character from the Fifties and Sixties, who fought against cosmic horror nightmares like we have today. I really love Quatermass and the Pit from 1967, huge recommendation. In today's movie, there is no perfect analogue for Prof. Quatermass, nobody is truly a hero of stiff-upper-lip rationalism. We have two lead scientists, Professor Birack (Victor Wong) and an unnamed physicist Catholic priest played by Donald Pleasence. (The subtitles calls him "Father Loomis", which is a play on the Halloween character - that name is not corroborated anywhere in the credits.) Anyway, our older gentlemen leaders are brilliant men with solid insights who build off each other's ideas. But they are not the heroes this moment calls for. They cower in fear for most of the movie.
Nobody's moral code or science saves the world in Prince of Darkness. Goodness triumphs only thanks to a brave tackle. The whole cast is easily an hour behind Satan's plan. They are just realizing there even is a Satan before most of them are possessed and all exits are patrolled killer zombie homeless people. Things get bad, get worse, keep getting worse, and the day is saved by what can only be called a total lucky fluke.
Prince of Darkness is about a group of researchers and graduate students at USC gathering for a weekend to study an old church in a dismal part of LA. This abandoned building had been controlled by a society called the 'Brotherhood of Sleep', an order so powerful and secret that even the Vatican was unaware of them. Their task had been to guard ancient texts and the cylinder of green liquid that is Satan, but now they've collapsed, and Satan is ready to play. While the scientists dig through a lot of technobabble on their readings, the texts are deciphered. This reveals that Jesus was an alien, and the Church murdered him for trying to tell the story of the Satan Jar. That might have helped right now, when Lucifer's slaves are spitting juice down people's throats, destroying their free will.
There is not much of a lead to Prince of Darkness. Brian (Jameson Parker) is the most prominent "action"-y character. If Kurt Russell were in this movie, this is the character he'd play. But Carpenter's more famous SciFi horror film, The Thing is not really a star vehicle either as much as an ensemble piece of various near-strangers doing a job that goes badly. That's more the vibe here too. Brian is dating and sleeping with Catherine (Lisa Blount) but their relationship is thorny and awkward. Most of the characters are nerds or technicians who look the part. You'll never be able to keep track of everybody, even the characters easily loose track of each other. You do get a self-appointed "comic relief" in Walter (Dennis Dun), whose antics are actively annoying to everybody, possessed or otherwise. He's not funny, I don't think he's meant to be funny. He's just having a bad night and cannot help himself any other way.
Since Satan is green slime that drips upwards, he's not going to be a compelling villain. We have kind of ensemble villainy too. The church is quickly surrounded by an army of unmoving homeless people covered in insects. (Carpenter's worst instinct is turning social problems into mindless hordes: homeless people here, minority gangs in Assault on Precinct 13.) The chief zombie is a character the credits call "Street Schizo" played by shock rocker Alice Cooper. The lead possessed person is a scientist named Susan (Anne Howard). Eventually Satan finds a "chosen one" of sorts, Kelly (Susan Blanchard), whose transformation is some of the most unpleasant body horror of the Eighties.
Kelly has to suck in all of the green shit into her eyes and mouth, and then spends the better part of a day "becoming". At first she grows a massive stomach as if grotesquely pregnant, while her body absorbs the invader. The results is a nightmare somewhere between radiation burns and AIDS anxieties. Her flesh just melts away into lesions. I'm leaning more on the AIDS metaphor, since Kelly's first symptom is an unexplained dark bruise. Whatever it is, it is really gross, and Prince of Darkness is a gross movie already. One guy melts away into bugs.
Yes, the content of Prince of Darkness is objectively horrifying. One guy stabs himself in the throat while loudly singing 'Amazing Grace', then spends the rest of his time possessed laughing and weeping at his own reflection. But beyond just recounting the horror, there's something else here. There's something really strange about the entire production. The fact Carpenter filmed the whole movie in thirty days in real locations with relatively unknown actors gives it a guerilla quality. We get footage shot from the future projected via tachyon into dreams (again, weird movie) that filmed off a television playing a distorted VHS tape. But the whole movie is sorta dusty. Prince of Darkness just does not look like a movie from 1987, it is unsettling. There's very little color, no fashion-sense, no movie stars, just people in drab clothes having a very bad night.
Or maybe the confusing timelessness comes from Jameson Parker's big bushy Ned Flanders mustache. That awful thing does not belong in any year.
For some reason Prince of Darkness has ended up in the territory of being one of Carpenter's "minor works". This is the second film in Carpenter's informal "Apocalypse Trilogy" and the least-seen. Everybody loves The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness has a solid cult audience, while not many people are celebrating Prince of Darkness. I can understand why. This is a terrifying movie but it is not a fun movie. There are few characters you can cheer for like a Kurt Russell. There are no big Wilford Brimley or Jürgen Prochnow performance to ham things up. Scary things happen but in slow, methodical, almost clinical ways. It is unrelenting in its disturbing qualities.
I recommend Prince of Darkness fully, this is a great movie, it might just be the scariest Carpenter film.
Next Time! Louis Cypher? There's nothing suspicious about that name! Let's get sweaty with Angel Heart.
No comments:
Post a Comment