Movie Review- Prince of Darkness

Prince of Darkness is an interesting but flawed effort from John Carpenter. This is the only horror movie as far as I am aware that incorporates quantum physics in its story. There is literally a quantum particle antichrist in this movie. I have never seen that in a movie before. There is also an odd plot point about messages sent from the future via dreams. I appreciate this unusual direction in what is otherwise a mundane devil-horror flick. The concepts are never quite as fleshed out as they could have been, but the idea is interesting nonetheless.

Bizarrely, the movie does not find its footing until the third act. Typically a bad movie will fall apart after the first act, but Prince of Darkness does the reverse and only becomes entertaining in the last 35 minutes or so. The preceding 70 minutes is mostly just people standing around in a church and staring at a jar of swirling green fog. The subatomic devil in a jar starts causing spooky mischief almost right off the bat, but none of it is particularly creepy. Some ants crawl on a TV and a homeless woman tries to give Donald Pleasance a cup full of bugs. Alice Cooper shows up for a brief and distracting cameo as a ghostly pale hobo that stabs a guy with part of a bicycle. The demonic jar leaks green goo on a radiologist. It feels like John Carpenter threw all of his stray ideas into the script and then just left them there unedited.

After an hour of weird goings-on, things actually get creepy. One of the 30something-playing-a-college-student gets possessed by the devil jar, because she had a bruise shaped like the Blue Oyster Cult logo (It makes no sense when the movie explains it, either). She turns into a grotesque Freddy Kruger lookalike and general pandemonium ensues. Maybe it's because the lighting is really eerie and shadowy during the finale, but the ending managed to elicit feeling of dread from me that few other horror movies ever have. The future-dream scenes have an unsettling 2nd generation videotape look that gave me the heebie-jeebies. The jar devil tries to emerge from a makeup kit mirror. Believe me, it's way creepier on screen.

I cannot entirely recommend Prince of Darkness because of its general lack of coherency, but there are a lot of interesting ideas at play in the film. If you are a die-hard horror fan, there is some definite value in the ending. Everyone else should probably skip it. This movie could really use a remake. If done right, it could be one incredibly scary film.