PRINCE OF DARKNESS
A film review by altera!bert
Copyright 1987 altera!bert
Anyway, I know all you John Carpenter fans have been waiting years now since THE THING for a real Carpenter horror flick. Well, PRINCE OF DARKNESS isn't it. The premise of the rebirth of Satan on Earth is very badly set up with a lot of absurdly bad metaphysics and theology. The horror and suspense are nil--people stupidly wander off alone and you just know they're going to get it. First you see them walking down the hall, then all of a sudden, somebody appears from the side of screen and stabs them, breaks their neck, or spits at them and then the scene is over (this last part, from the appearance of the second person to the end of the scene, typically lasts 1.5 seconds). By the way, in case you're wondering "Spits at them?", well, that's supposed to be scary but as you can already tell just by reading about it, it's so stupid, you want to laugh every time it happens. There is no gore whatsoever. However, if you're into disgusting things, this movie might be for you. There are a lot of shots of worms and bugs and maggots and all those fun things. There's a nice long sequence in which one of the characters walks around with the worst skin affliction you've ever seen. And there's one really funny scene in which a man standing up is being eaten by zillions of bugs and his body parts start to fall off. Actually, a lot of the movie is so bad that it's funny.
Other comments: the music never stops and it gets really annoying really fast; the intro credits are interspersed with the beginning of the movie so that it takes about 10 minutes before they're all done with; the acting is really lame (most of the actors I recognized from TV series), the worst being Donald Pleasance as a priest; and, finally, this movie has the highest Asian count--3--among all movies (I know of) in which the characters' races were irrelevant.
Rating? 0 on -4/+4, $1/Cable on $(1st view/2nd view) and maybe 2 on S&N.
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