Post by rra on May 26, 2008 11:47:57 GMT -5
John Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987) - ***
Ever liked a movie, even though you didn't understand really what was happening alot of the time?
I guess my biggest criticism against PRINCE OF DARKNESS, its that for the first half of the picture, the narrative is moved only by tons and tons of dialogue exposition, alot of which flies by rather quickly. At this rate, much like with Michael Mann's THE KEEP, I think I have an idea of the grand scheme of things, but I could be wrong for all I know.
2,000 years ago, the slime essence of Satan, aka Ole Scratch, aka Michael Bay, was captured in a cannister by Jesus Christ, and kept locked away by a secret brotherhood within the Catholic Church. Just after a Priest (Donald Pleasance) inherits this devil gak, which now resides at an abandoned church in Los Angeles, this cylinder starts leaking and random weirdness occurs like fire ants crawling all over the television to worms sticking to windows, or my favorite, a half-moon orbiting above the sun. Pleasance consults a physics professor (Victor Wong) and his students to study this mysterious goo...
And right there is a cool thing about PRINCE OF DARKNESS. In every other movie where religion and supernatural collide, its always a church wanting science to strike out so that its priests can declare a divine miracle, or science wanting to demystify stigmata or whatever.
With DARKNESS, you have a top religious guy discovering something that scares him shitless, and so he gets this top science guy to check into it, and it scares him shitless too. Science and Religion, both bodies of knowledge, are dumbfounded and fail at the feet of the literal existence that is elemental evil.
What I think I dig the most in general about PRINCE OF DARKNESS is that at this point in writer/composer/director John Carpenter's career, after getting his salad tossed around by studio politics on BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, he decided to both go back to low budget basics, and screw with Hollywood on their nickel & dime.
Yeah he'll give Universal what looks and sounds like a slasher jump scare movie, hell he gets Pleasance back from his own slasher jump scare classic HALLOWEEN, along with enough gory make-up and nasty gooey insects to fill up the genre quota. Meanwhile, he'll also make something technically more blasphemous at the Church in Rome than THE DA VINCI CODE and THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST combined.
Ironically, unless I'm wrong, DARKNESS is popular in the very Catholic Spain. Way to go Carp!
I did notice though in watching DARKNESS that it was probably the beginning of the end for Carpenter's creative prowess, considering how he effectively remade his own ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, except instead of zombie-like street gangs trying to storm a police station, its actual zombies and Alice Cooper laying siege to the church. The guy was practically starting to rip himself off.
DARKNESS is a solid B-horror movie in that while we've been through the tried and worn "stupid people" genre plot dynamics before, its got alot of great neat little moments that rule. Take that bizarre shot when the zombie outside the church calls out the survivors this side of EVIL DEAD, yells "Pray for Death!" and then explodes into beetles. Then there is when the heroes, deprived of the usual weapons (fireaxe, guns) used to combat zombies, have to resort to using bricks to bash their skulls in, or kneeing women in the groin(!) before throwing them out the window.
Now that's creative.
But the cake-icing for DARKNESS though is when the beseiged people start having bits & pieces of the same creepy collective dream, a Tachyon pulse-produced video message this side of CLOVERFIELD from the future of 1999, which warns these people repeatedly that they have to stop Satan from resurrecting, and pulling his "daddy" the Anti-God from his interdimensional prison.
Yet after the climax, when we finally watch the complete dream and finally see Satan emerge from the shadows, its baffingly fun. Did these folks change the future, or is it a self-fulfilling prophecy in spite of their best efforts?
If anything, seeing Dennis Dun in DARKNESS also reminds me of how Hollywood really dropped the ball with that guy. The unofficial badass hero of Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, and unless I'm mistaken, the only Asian-American Action Cinema hero during the 1980s, Dun has a charming presence, in spite of being an asshole when he told that one Chinese woman, "you almost could pass off as Asian."
Yeah, you're expecting him to die for that insult, but he actually grows on you, especially when he's trapped in the closet. There is a great scene when you have the heroes dig through the wall all night to break him out, but when the zombies finally break down his door, Dun basically claws his way out within minutes in a frenzy of desperation.
In short, the best movie featuring a cruicified pigeon ever made.