Review of Prince of Darkness (1987) by Ryan F — 28 Nov 2010

Prince of Darkness is a film that you really want to be good. Sadly, it just isn't.

Prince of Darkness is the result of John Carpenter completely overindulging himself. Going absolutely nuts, not wacky, like BTILC, just so ridiculous that's its stupid.

Prince of Darkness starts off looking good. Its got a nice classic Carpenter horror feel, like that of The Thing, Halloween, or his other classics. However, it eventually completely loses its mind.

Prince of Darkness's main problems are rooted in the story, and Carpenter's love of weird special effects.

Carpenter is in full weird mode here. Collapsing bodies. Flesh eating beetles. Lunatic amounts of projectile vomit (think "The Exorcist", but stupid). Of course, inhumanly made up faces.

Seriously. Three spitting/vomiting scenes is enough. We don't need the five or ten that Carpenter has in the movie. It just gets repetitive and moronic.

Also, the overall plot is stupid. Its very difficult to follow. Without spoiling too much, lets just say the explanation of the strange happenings in the church where the movie takes place range from Anti-Matter to Religious Reasons, to Aliens.

I think. It got increasingly hard to follow. The plot is so contrived, and Carpenter gets so wrapped up in his science vs religion, that you just want it to end.

The scene to scene action isn't bad though. Carpenter does his usual good job of building suspense. One by one terrible things happen to the characters, and the movie does leave you guessing about who goes next, while keeping you emotionally involved in some of the characters, so that you don't want them to die.

Well, most of them you don't want to die. There is the requisite horror movie jerk who you want to die.

However, all in all, the contrived plot just left me groaning so much that I didn't care, and I just wanted it to end.

And when it does end, the final climax is so dragged out (even by John Carpenter standards) its just painful. I mean really painful. I just wanted to get it over with.

Of course, the movie ends with fifty twists, and an open end, leaving you questioning what really happened. But honestly, by the end, I didn't care about what really happened. I was just happy that the credits were rolling.

Prince of Darkness isn't John Carpenter's worst film. But its far from being even an average movie.

If you want to rent it, do so, just don't expect much.