The Prince of Darkness-John Carpenter

During the late 90's/early 2000's I had enmeshed myself within the John Carpenter library and plowed through many of his titles. Even as a kid, I was mesmerized at how one director could just be so damn good at cooking up quality product every single time he stepped into the celluloid kitchen.

Big Trouble In Little China, The Thing, They Live!, Assault on Precinct 13, Escape From New York, The Fog, Christine, Starman, and, of course, Halloween…every single title of which, in my opinion, is a grand slam at the plate. Just looking at that catalog alone—which is rattled off from the top of my head—I still don't think that his collective library has been appreciated at the appropriate level. To me, his resume is better than Tarantino's, Polanski's, & Michael Mann's.

The golden hardware may be lacking, but the steady thread of quality certainly is not.

That statement may be biased hyperbole, and everyone's criteria are different, but Carpenter's films, time after time, left more of a lasting impression upon me, that made me want to watch his movies over and over again, than any of the aforementioned. And that's after I professing that Michael Mann's "Heat" is the greatest movie ever made, so you know that such a proclamation of Carpenter packing a better arsenal than those heavyweights isn't being made with a mere grain of salt.

If academy awards are cast aside, then does one mammoth title on the resume catapult a director to the front of the respect line and beyond his cohorts? To some, this may be the prime meridian that separates truly great directors from those who are just solid.

If that is the case then Polanski, Tarantino, and Mann best Carpenter in that regard. Polanski has three titles that I believe to be in the top 50 of all time (Rosemary's Baby, The Pianist, & Chinatown). Tarantino has two (Reservoir Dogs & Pulp Fiction). And Michael Mann also has two (Heat & The Last of The Mohicans). Now, others may argue that other titles within the catalog of each director are superior to the ones that I mentioned, and in some respects, they may be right.

*I prefer Mann's Thief to Last of the Mohicans*

The beauty lies in the fact that there is no official measuring stick or weight system to base judgment upon. But, for the sake of my own personal rating system, I consider the attributed films to be of epic status. Ones that will be remembered well beyond 100 years from now for the impact they had. And in Carpenter's case, he has one under his belt: Halloween.

Having said all that, it came as a surprise to me, that within the past couple of years, I realized that I still hadn't seen everything Carpenter had made. The biggest title being "The Prince of Darkness".

I do remember seeing "In the Mouth of Madness" back in high school and not caring for it.

I think that this may be a case of a cerebral terror film that was viewed with adolescent goggles, whose ultimate judge and jury of a film decided the final verdict based upon violence and stabbing, and that I should watch it again to grasp the concept with a more mature set of eyes.

After In the Mouth of Madness though, Carpenter's films began to deteriorate in quality and he sort of disappeared from behind the lens to play video games with his son and focus on music.

Not a bad way to retire, I must say.

The Prince of Darkness was a fairly difficult title to locate for some reason, so I was elated to see its acquisition by Shudder.

I nerded out on a Friday night and went full George McFly spending a weekend evening at home with Science Fiction theater and ordered a pizza and sat down to enjoy this Carpenter foray into the H.G. Wells landscape and was not disappointed.

His ability to create an eerie setting using nothing more than human emotions, a few grotesque elements, and proper synthesizer notes is the signature Hallmark of his work and second to none. Others have imitated this recipe to some degree of success (It Follows) but nobody that I have seen yet has ever come close to that magic Carpenter can create with his scores.

And who says you need to be in either a suburban or rural setting to make a horror movie?

I think that this is one of the unspoken rules of horror filmmaking: That no plausible story can be placed within a metropolis due to the vast amount of escape routes. But Carpenter, Romero, Holland, Craven, and Rose dispelled this notion with amazing results.

And this is the setting for The Prince of Darkness. An ancient church in Southern California that holds the key to a portal which is the boundary line keeping Satan, or, rather, the son of Satan, within his prison cell of hell, and away from the planet Earth.

Carpenter demands a lot of suspension from the viewer but does so with credible storytelling and sufficient evidence, that we as the audience are willing to go along with the fact that ancient writing handed down through a posterity of Catholic priests, outdating the Dead Sea scrolls, usurp written scripture and provide the secret which has been kept for thousands of years in the basement of a Los Angeles church.

It seems like a lot to digest, and I know I butchered the plot all to hell, but when dealing with the supernatural, any "natural" parameters are pretty much null and void anyway, so it's not so difficult to go along with what is being offered.

I love how the creep factor steadily ascends as one by one each of the scientific researchers falls victim to the satanic blood of the green goo. The psychic dreams from the future were a nice touch as well. And I especially liked the claustrophobic effect that the possessed derelicts—led by a perfectly cast ringleader named Alice Cooper—outside of the church presented.

Much like the apocalyptic future that one day shall arrive on planet Earth, there was no escaping the fate of everyone who attempted to prevent Satan's emergence from the abyss.

This was a good film, one I enjoyed very much and would like to revisit one day. But I wouldn't place it in the same echelon as some of his other titles. Rather, it floats along that intermediary stream within his library of being better than Escape from L.A., Vampires, and Ghosts of Mars. But not worthy enough to ride along with the steamships of Big Trouble in Little China or Starman.

This foray into the supernatural was fun, but just didn't quite pack the Sci-Fi punch that They Live! did either.

Stars: ***1/2

Verdict: Watch

Cousins: They Live!, 28 days later, Dawn of The Dead, Alien, Hellraiser