An old priest dies and it is discovered that he was guarding a secret held in the basement of a long-abandoned church - a mysterious vat of green liquid. The investigating priest, Father Loomis - yes, that's Donald Pleasence playing an only slightly-altered version of his Halloween character - calls in a physics professor and several of his grad students to investigate the liquid. Strange things are afoot, however - the Sun and moon are in conjunction, insects are acting strangely, and Alice Cooper is leading a band of homeless people to lay siege to the church. Oh, and the green liquid is Satan and he is preparing to bring his father, the Anti-God, into the world to start the apocalypse.
I first saw Prince of Darkness about 20 years ago, when I was in my teens, and I don't think I really appreciated it back then. It seemed slow and confusing, and I couldn't get my head round a lot of the physics and metaphysics that made up a lot of the film, and so I wrote it off as something of a misfire on John Carpenter's part. That and I found it difficult to take Satan the evil lava lamp too seriously.
Watching the film now, however, I could see and understand a lot better some of the themes that Carpenter was going for with the movie. There's hints of influence from some of his earlier films, most notably Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing - the latter also because Carpenter considers The Thing to be the first film in his "Apocalypse trilogy" and Prince of Darkness to be the second - in aspects like the isolation of the characters, the army of homeless people effectively laying siege to the church, and how it is impossible to tell who has been "possessed" by Satan's evil green liquid until they reveal themselves. There's also more than a hint of Lovecraftian horror there too, in the idea of "Satan" being shapeless (as the sinister green liquid) and the idea of the "Anti-God" whose very presence on our plane of existence would bring about the Apocalypse. If we'd seen any tentacles in the climactic scenes I wouldn't have been in the least bit surprised.
As someone who suffers from entomophobia, the scenes with the insects were probably more disturbing for me than they would be to most people. The ants I could cope with - I'm fine with most things with six legs - but when the film graduated to maggots and earthworms covering whole windows, I had to start watching the film with my feet several feet off the floor. The insects are used to cringeworthy effect, and they certainly do emphasize the otherworldly, corrupting effect that liquid Satan is producing.
One thing that doesn't seem to have changed from my initial opinions, however, is that I still feel the film moves too slow. There are a good few discussions on science and belief, theoretical physics and even tachyons and time travel (which may or may not be accurate, as one person tells me that tachyons only move at the speed of light, while Wikipedia tells me that they always move faster than the speed of light - this is a danger of putting too much theoretical physics in your film; some of us barely passed the damn class), but I think at least one or two of them could have been cut from the film without losing too much. When stuff does start to happen it's effective and creepy (and this is not a gory film by any means, so anyone expecting scenes similar to that of The Thing will likely leave disappointed), but the buildup is still slow enough that you start to wonder if you've put in the wrong film. Also, Satan is an evil lava lamp and I challenge anybody to look at that and not have at least a moment of, "Yeah, right."
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