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.
No comments:
Post a Comment