This is not a dream! It’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to
review a fine October spookshow, John “Halloween”
Carpenter’s return to the small scale, Prince
of Darkness! This is the picture he made after the unfair box-office
flubup of the delightful Big Trouble in Little China, which is a movie so ridiculously entertaining that when ol’ Burl and a friend went
to see it in the theatre, on its conclusion we just looked at one another and
wordlessly settled back into our seats to watch it again right away!
I saw Prince of
Darkness in the theatre too, but may have had to sneak in because it was
rated R, for super-silliness perhaps! Ha ha! The picture is Carpenter’s tribute
to Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass pictures, because I guess Halloween III, which Kneale actually wrote (before it was changed
around a lot and he had his name taken off) didn’t quite work out that way!
Carpenter wrote the script for this one himself, but took the credit “Martin
Quatermass!” Ha ha, subtle!
The story has a priest, played of course by Donald “You Only Live Twice” Pleasance,
discovering that a little-known Catholic sect has kept the devil trapped in a
carboy in a downtown Los Angeles church! Ha ha, you can imagine his surprise!
The devil is in liquid form, and for no particular reason has begun seeping out
of his bottle! Naturally the next step is to recruit an eccentric physics
professor and a number of postgraduate students, and have them camp out in the
church to ponder on the problem!
Much of the first half of the picture is the students
scoffing loudly at their situation and proclaiming it “bullshit”! It seems a
preemptive stratagem on Carpenter’s part, frankly! But when they start having
crazy dreams that prove in fact to be messages from a demonically-plagued
future (the messages come from “the year one-nine-nine-fzzzt!”), the Kneality
kicks in! Ha ha, that’s the scariest part right there, those dreams!
It comes down to a lot of running around the church (almost
all the movie is set there) and fighting with possessed grad students! The
movie presages the [Rec] series of
pictures by conflating demonic possession with zombieism, though these
particular possessed zombies aren’t as scary as they should be! Ha ha, they’re
not scary at all, really, though I did like the one who stands in the parking
lot calling out warnings before he disintegrates into a pile of bugs!
Almost nothing makes much sense, but that’s not a problem,
at least not to ol’ Burl! I’ve always liked this picture, flawed as it is, and
I fear I won’t be able to make a very lucid case for why you should see it! I
just like it! I like the cast, or some of it at least, like Pleasance and
Victor Wong as the physicist, and the ponky, mustached guy who plays the lead!
And Dennis Dun is always good too, ha ha! I like the climax, in which Pleasance
is trapped in a closet longer than R. Kelly ever was, and in which we are given
some genuinely eerie imagery!
I never thought of this as a gory picture, but it does have
a few heads and hands coming off, and some impalements and suchlike! Ha ha, the
glasses nerd from Riptide and The Horror Show even gets turned
into a living bike by Alice Cooper! Say what you like about this movie, but you’re
never going to see a scene like that anywhere else! I don’t mind being a
cheerleader for the film, because I figure someone has to be, and so I’m going to
give Prince of Darkness three
ant-filled TV sets!
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