Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Prince of Darkness




   
Prince of Darkness
1987
Director- John Carpenter
Cast- Jameson Parker, Donald Pleasence, Victor Wong, Lisa Blount, Dennis Dun
            
   The 1980s were the pinnacle of John Carpenter’s career; The Thing, The Fog, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape from New York and They Live. Most directors would be lucky to make one of these impressive movies in their career, much less all of these in a single decade. With so much greatness around it, Prince of Darkness is over shadowed, but this is one dark little gem that should not be over looked.
            

    There are a lot of recognizable faces, both John Carpenter regulars, and other actors from the 80s, most surprisingly is Jameson Parker, best known as one half of Simon and Simon. The casting is spot on and Carpenter’s score, which tends to be too minimal sometimes, suits the understated nature of the film.
            
    The difference between science fiction and horror is whether it makes you think or feel, but this movie does both as it delivers both scares and head scratching ideas. The film poses a fundamental question; what if evil is real? Not real in the sense that it really exists, but real in the sense that it can be empirically proven, measured, and observed.

Donald Pleasance (Halloween) is a priest in a Catholic sect that has guarded a mysterious cylinder for two thousand years. Inside that cylinder, it is believed, lives an ancient evil, perhaps Satan himself. Victor Wong (Big Trouble in Little China and The Golden Child) is a theoretical physicist who has been recruited to prove the existence of the evil that lives within the cylinder. In the process, the evil within escapes and the horror begins.
            

     One of the film’s ideas is that Satan is not the enemy of God, but rather the opposite of God, an Anti- God, like an anti-matter particle, governing the existence of a mirror universe. Don’t expect the dramatic, memorable, scenes of Carpenter’s other works. This story progresses at the slow, deliberate pace of a scientist testing a hypothesis, and in the end it will probably leave you with more questions than answers. This is fitting. In science, nothing is ever really proven; you can only fail to disprove it.
            

     But don’t think that this movie is a detached philosophical debate.  The film’s apocalyptic warnings, presented as unnatural occurrences and sinister dreams, create a sense of impending doom that builds throughout.

       As intellectually stimulating as the film is, it is still essentially a horror movie as its ultimate effect is emotional. The film is unsettling, and in the worse way possible because you won’t be able to identify why you feel so uneasy. Is it the subtle, dark mood, the sinister warnings, the unanswered questions or the short bursts of violence spread throughout the film? Or perhaps it’s some gestalt, something than can only be perceived when seen as a whole and in the context of some larger message.
    




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