Film review: Prince of Darkness (1987)

I have come to the conclusion that the only non-cheesy John Carpenter film is The Thing.  (Oh, and maybe his Spielbergian film Starman - but that's his least Carpenteresque.)  Now, The Thing is an unquestioned classic, with hands down the best practical (i.e., non computer generated) effects ever.  But what makes it non-cheesy (I think) is the quality of the acting.  Nobody's hamming it up, and everyone acts pretty much naturalistically (if that's a word).  I say this for contrast with every other John Carpenter film, this one being no exception.  Now, this doesn't stop a lot of them (say, They Live) from being great fun and arguably even good films, but there's always a slightly amateurish (or, again, hammy) quality to the acting that undercuts their effectiveness.  You get the impression that that's just not Carpenter's interest.  He's more of a 3-D comic-book creator.  Okay, so back to Prince of Darkness.  Let's just say, if The Thing is tier one, and others like Escape from New York and They Live are tier two, then it's at least tier 3.  I'm not even sure I can summarize the plot, but here goes.  Essentially it's Assault on Precinct 13 (definitely tier 2) only with possessed zombies outside the building (which is a church) instead of gang members,* and The Devil Himself in liquid form (I shit you not) in a big tube in the basement, gradually infecting everyone in the building.  The building is a church in a scummy part of LA which is built over a basement that dates back to the 1500s.  The big glass tube full of swirling glowing green fluid dates back thousands of years, according to documents that are translated by a crack classicist (before she gets infected) that contains the son of the father of the devil (or some such nonsense).  This is discovered by Donald Pleasance (game as ever, but you've got to feel a little sorry for him) after the old monk who's been guarding the tube for the ancient "Brotherhood of Sleep" dies and Donald (who's just a regular priest) comes into possession of the key leading to that basement.  He sees the tube and decides that he needs the help of... academics!  So he recruits a crack team of physicists, chemists and classicists and they all move in to the abandoned church, a little alarmed at the small army of homeless people covered in bugs that close in on them as they enter.  And so begins the slow process of possessing the academics one by one (by the means of liquid transference - usually spitting like a geyser into their mouths).  Our (slightly creepy) hero is a porn-mustached tragically 80's-clad cypher (part of the problem with the film) who is one of the physics PhD candidates (and who has the hots for another, the red-headed, voluminously denim-clad Catherine).  Comic relief is provided by Walter, the squirrely Asian (which Carpenter uses as an excuse to have hm tell racist jokes) other physics student (who is a PhD candidate who has nonetheless only just heard about Schrodinger's cat).  Is it good?  God, no.  Is it quite effective as a horror film?  Yes - it manages to be pretty much relentlessly tense (despite all the ridiculous shenanigans and mediocre acting) and there are some undeniably gross images (most involving thousands of bugs - although the bugs themselves appear to be rather friendly-looking beetles).  Oh, and Alice Cooper has a bit part as one of the zombie homeless people outside the church, and gets to have the first kill (by means of bicycle).  For completists only, though.

(*Now I think about it, just about every John Carpenter film has the same device of having the protagonists trapped somewhere.  Dark Star - spaceship.  Escape from New York - a walled-in futuristic New York.  Assault - an old police station.  The Thing - a base in the Arctic, and so on.  It's kind of amazing he never directed a film called Trapped!)