Prince of Darkness (1987) - John Carpenter

Prince of Darkness is boring. Not the, turn it off and do something else boring. But the, maybe if I lean close enough and stop talking it might get better, kind of boring. This all star cast that had mostly worked with Carpenter before, did about as good as they could have. It wasn't like John Carpenter was choosing out of the A-List category here. I mean we get a good variety. Donald Pleasence, he worked with Carpenter on Halloween. Dennis Dun and Victor Wong both worked with him on Big Trouble in Little China. He chooses from the people he knows. In the future he will even pull new actors from this movie into his other productions. Susan Blanchard goes on to work in They Live. I am sorry for rambling... my point is this. When you are choosing from such a small community you really limit what you have to work with. Sometimes you are blessed with awesome actors, other times you have to make do with what you have. I think John Carpenter has that problem. He has to make do with what he has.

That being said. Prince of Darkness is a pretty decent movie, for being a Carpenter flick. It still holds that gritty grimy grind-house style that he likes to use. I think that is why it seems so out of place. I don't know. It feels like John Carpenter was trying to be Steven Spielberg. He wanted to make every movie feel like a Goonies type adventure. This just had that vibe. The movie does have some really creepy scenes and captures, pretty well, some decently creepy "found footage" stuff.

The movie is about a group of college students, a professor, and a priest that stay overnight in a creepy church in Los Angeles. In the basement of the church there is a weird cylinder that has a weird creepy green liquid in it, that liquid is either the Anti-Christ or a demon. Something evil. The liquid is sentient and begins to possess the students. Meanwhile, everyone is having weird dreams that actually turn out to be neurally-transmitted messages from the future. The dreams/messages are warning the students. They show something creepy and evil hovering in a church doorway. Its weird. The green liquids motive is to possess a body and have that body pull the Devil himself from a mirror.

The storyline is hard to grasp at times, it doesn't help that most of the film is inaudible. Donald Pleasance and Victor Wong speak in mumbles and half-tones. It's a wonder I figured anything about the movie out. This film still feels a lot like Big Trouble in Little China, released the year before. There are really campy moments that completely make this movie an icon of its era. There are others that make me sit back and scratch my head. However, this is a pretty decent eighties movie and a great installment to the 31 movies of Halloween.

Director: John Carpenter
Country: USA
Style: Demonic Adventure Horror

Did ya know...

Donald Pleasence plays Father Loomis, a reference to his character in Halloween. This is the second film in John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy. The first being The Thing and the third being In the Mouth of Madness. This was the first movie that Carpenter had done independently since Escape from New York.

The Human Monster (1939) - Walter Summers

Bela Lugosi turns in a fantastic performance. It is right on par with the exact same films that had made him famous like Dracula . My personal favorite being The Black Cat . Like the latter, this film suffered from poor circulation and lack of advertisement. Either that or the public wasn't interested in seeing Lugosi in anything else other than his famous bloodsucker. This film has a broad and well acted plot that was rich with detail. Lugosi has two sides in this picture. His well loved and compassionate side. The other is a strict, brutal lone shark that acts as a sinister villain to blind and handicapped people. He really brutalizes his victims. It's a macabre message to pay your bills. The film is slow moving and plagued by the usual setbacks from its time. Most of the nation wasn't really that concerned with horror at the time. But studios knew that they would always have an audience. This film is a prime example of that. It's sad because it's

Not scared yet? »

Ju-On (2000) - Takashi Shimizu

Watching Japanese horror is similar to watching British comedy. If you enjoy dry whit then you probably enjoy the boys of Monty Python in drag. That's the joke, they're dressed like women. Get it? Well, that's British humor. But if you're like most Americans you probably prefer Adam Sandler farting his way across a football field and hooking up with chicks that are way out of his league. Americans usually prefer this more in your face, crass brand of humor. My point is funny in England is different from funny in the US. The same goes for J-Horror. What the Japanese consider scary is very different from what Americans consider scary and it shows in this horror film. Japanese horror is generally slow (a little too slow sometimes), suspenseful and creepy. Ju-On is a creepy effing film. The movie has almost no soundtrack. It is incredibly suspenseful and the pay-offs are pretty awesome, but I think that it was done better in the American version (cultural t

Not scared yet? »

Inseminoid (1981) - Norman J. Warren

What can be said for mindless schlock pictures like this one. They were pumped out in droves during the eighties. Inseminoid !? give me a break! It sounds like some pre-pubescent teenage boys came up with the title. On the plus side the movie isn't horrible to look at and it has a decent amount of gore. If you can separate yourself from the political incorrectness, then you might have a perfectly decent Sci-Fi Monster Feature. A research team exploring caves on Jupiter accidentally awakens an ancient alien that rapes and impregnates one of the team members. She suffers from terrible shock and trauma, leading to a complete mental breakdown as her pregnancy accelerates faster and faster. Feeling threatened she decides to kill anyone she deems a threat. Can the rest of the research team survive or will they all become victims of INSEMINOID! Apparently this movie had a million dollar budget. That's really shocking considering the outcome of the picture. The acting

Not scared yet? »

Horror Movie Project

Search This Blog