The Prince of Darkness (1987) DVD review

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The Prince of Darkness (1987) DVD review

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A priest discovers a cylinder full of satan underneath an old church. He recruits a college professor and his classroom of students to help avert the coming of the anti-God. As the prophecy nears completion, creepy stuff starts happening in the old abandonded church and the surrounding area.

I have to get this off my chest first...

The credits continue to roll 12 minutes into the movie. 12 minutes. I'm totally fucking serious. That has got to be some kind of record.

This was written and directed by John Carpenter, who has made such horror classics as Halloween, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China. I mentioned these 3 particular movies because Prince of Darkness contains elements of all 3 of those films. The music is straight the fuck out of The Thing. I could close my eyes and I would think it was the exact same score. The old doctor from Halloween plays the old priest in this. Finally, the hardest to get over, were the two chinese actors from Big Trouble in Little China. I'll call them the old one and the young one. You'll know them when you see them. Oh yeah, Alice Cooper makes a cameo as a possessed homeless man.

I don't think this movie has aged nearly as well as many of Carpenter's earlier films. The story, while original, just dosen't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. It is rushed at parts and spends too much time lingering in others. The "love story" consists of the guy asking the girl out, then que waking up the next morning in bed together. Literally, that's how it happens. Then they proceed to act like an old married couple, which is about as far from realistic as you can get when you wake up next to someone you just met and fucked less than 8 hours ago.


I also caught onto kind of a weird stereotype that was thrown in there. At one point, the homeless in the area all stand single file around the church. A woman who apparently knows a lot about psychological issues is observing them and says something like "That's weird, paranoid schizophrenics usually cannot stand still because they have so many obsessive compulsive routines they go through". My first thought was "Hey lady, not every homeless person is a paranoid schizophrenic!"


I thought the ending was alright, so that is something.

I know I just spent all this time dogging the movie, but I cannot help but have a campy effection for it despite all it's flaws. Maybe it's the way they tried to weave mathmatics and physics in with relgion and an end of days prophecy. I'm not sure. It sure wasn't the characters. I din't really care about a single one of them. I remember seeing this late at night when I was a kid and it just kind of stuck in my head. At the time, I thought it was great!

I would end up with a 6.5/10 for the movie. If I took out my feelings of nostalgia, it would probably be more like a 5/10.
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Re: The Prince of Darkness (1987) DVD review

Post by Tyek »

I always hate when they remake classic movies. Do we need a Poltergeist remake? The other side of that is a movie like this. I enjoyed it when it can out, I own it, but it definitely shows its age. An update would be great for this movie...or could be depending who did it.
When I was younger, I used to think that the world was doing it to me and that the world owes me some thing…When you're a teeny bopper, that's what you think. I'm 40 now, I don't think that anymore, because I found out it doesn't f--king work. One has to go through that. For the people who even bother to go through that, most assholes just accept what it is anyway and get on with it." - John Lennon
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