It’s right around the 40-minute mark that horror master John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness wavers on its promising setup. The acting is never great, and neither is the script, but the story, until it goes haywire, checks a lot of boxes for someone with my taste in horror. Mysterious tomes, secret brotherhoods, dream theory, and religious prophecy mixed with scientific research and academia combine to form what could have been a tremendous Lovecraftian yarn. But instead, we get a second-rate pseudo-zombie flick with no bite and a dwindling atmosphere.
If ever a Priest (Donald Pleasence) and a Professor (Victor Wong) enter a vaulted door leading to a forgotten cellar of an old dilapidated church, I’m on the edge of my seat. Seeing a man of God and a man of science descending a dark staircase together with only a lantern to guide them conjures up so many H. P. Lovecraft stories that I care not to count. “This is great!” I thought. “Carpenter is really nailing it this time!” Then I noticed that once at the bottom of the rickety steps, several candles were already lit. Then, several more. Soon, there were hundreds of them burning and I couldn’t help but wonder who in the hell lit them all? That’s when I realized Prince of Darkness might go astray.
After a team of scientists is called in to study a strange green liquid found in a giant test tube in the previously mentioned church basement, things get strange. From the large group of homeless people (led by Alice Cooper) staring menacingly at the church to the “infected” waging an unexciting and incomprehensible war against those insides, Prince of Darkness moves quickly from a film about deciphering an ancient mystery to a poorly executed siege movie. Nothing remains to grab onto, especially not the attempt at a romantic angle or the flat comic relief (although some of Dennis Dun’s lines are nearly cringe-worthy enough to be considered funny). Not to mention, the entire dream messaging angle is completely wasted. One could make an entire film from that concept alone.
In addition, Prince of Darkness suffers from another of my pet peeves. When things get weird (like seeing a large pile of worms defy gravity and fall up towards the ceiling, for example), don’t stand there with a dumb look on your face and say something like “That’s odd.” No. Get the hell out of there! I’ll never understand why horror writers continually move their characters forward into situations that would destroy the sanity of any rational person. Steal a page from Lovecraft and have them flee for their lives before they wind up in the asylum.
John Carpenter has written and directed a handful of superb horror films – some of the best, in fact (including the greatest Lovecraftian movie ever made, 1982’s The Thing). Unfortunately, Prince of Darkness is not one of them. Despite my personal distaste for the remakes and reboots churned out by the major studios, I’d like to see someone with some reverence to Lovecraft, his weird fiction stalwarts, and Carpenter himself take a good crack at this one. There is a great story buried somewhere underneath what was produced in 1987. I’d like to see it unearthed.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.