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John Carpenter has released some of the most classic movies of all time. He’s made movies like The Thing, Christine, They Live, Big Trouble in Little China, the Escape movies and Vampires (with Jimmy Woods). All of those movies are classics, and if you say otherwise you’re a moron. However, with all of these great movies aside, it would be hard to believe that Carpenter could actually make a lesser type of film, but you’d be wrong. You’d be wrong because, thanks to the folks of FEARnet, I have found a lesser Carpenter film (well, one that isn’t Ghosts of Mars) entitled, Prince of Darkness.

Prince of Darkness is about a priest (Donald Pleasence), who finds a large cylinder filled with some constantly moving green goo in the basement of an abandoned church. To figure out what the fuck this green goo is, the priest enlists the help of a college professor named Howard Birack (Victor Wong). Wong brings a group of students with him to study the goo and they find out that this mysterious goo is actually Satan. Being the scientists that they are, they want to continue studying the goo, but shit starts going wrong. Some possessed bums, including one played by Alice Cooper, kill some of the students that leave because they have better things to do on a weekend, like fucking and drinking, while Satan starts possessing some of the other students on the inside by making them swallow him. So, slowly, people start getting picked off one by one until we are left with a small group of people trying to figure out how they are going to survive and prevent Satan’s master plan (which involves bringing his father, a being that is supposed to be an Anti-God, into the world).

For a Carpenter movie, this movie is pretty weak. The writing for the movie is really bad; which is surprising because this is a Carpenter movie and the writing for his movies (which is done by him) are usually solid. The pacing is off for the movie as well. At the beginning of the movie, all the scenes, including the dialogue (which is full of super smart people dialogue and is hard to catch sometimes… at least for dumb people like me), go back so quickly that you don’t even know what the fuck is happening. Then it slows down a bit while they are in the church, only to pick up again towards the end. The ending for the movie is just… retarded. In fact, it is so retarded that I should ruin it to save you from seeing this movie, but I won’t because if I sat through this movie, then you should too. The last problem comes from the horrible acting. Pleasence and Wong usually give solid performances, but they give some dull performances in this one… on a lighter note, Wong does kill a possessed dude with a soda and some chopsticks.

It’s hard to believe that John Carpenter could have a lesser movie, but he has done that with Prince of Darkness. He gets credit for coming up with a movie that had an interesting concept, but the story is pretty shitty. It seems like this movie was intended to be a thinking man’s scary movie, but ended up being a poorly written movie with bad acting, horrible pacing and a horrible ending.

Final Synopsis: It’s a weird movie. If you like Carpenter, rent it and judge for yourself, but honestly, I’m not in a rush to see this movie again.

Points Lost: -1 for bad acting, -1 for poor writing, -1 for pacing problems, -1 for some super smart people dialogue, -1 for a horrible ending.

Lesson Learned: A can of soda and some chopsticks are as deadly as The Vocabulariast wielding two shotguns.

Burning Question: Wouldn’t you run if you walked into a room and noticed that the container filled with the mysterious goo was dripping water… on the ceiling?

John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness
5/10

Tags: 1987, Alice Cooper, Dennis Dun, donald pleasence, horror, Jameson Parker, john carpenter, latest movie reviews, Lisa Blount, recent, recent1, Satan, thriller, Victor Wong