2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 30th

Prince of Darkness (1987) [Criterion]

This one was a rewatch.  I don't remember how long ago it was I first saw it; not during the original release, to be sure, sometime perhaps in the '90s or the Oughts.  I think as a video rental, rather than something on cable, though I couldn't tell you if it was VHS or DVD.  It's a movie I remembered as being not-great but wanted to give another shot.

It's better than I remembered, but still maybe not-great.  Watching this time, I couldn't but think of better John Carpenter movies.  The Thing, obviously, with the team of scientists trapped with something that is confined but gets loose and starts changing them into something else.  But also bits of Assault On Precinct 13 with the rows of silent besiegers and riffs on scares from Halloween.

I'm not sure why Prince of Darkness doesn't quite come together from the sum of its parts.  And it has great parts, mind you: a bit of cosmic horror, SF riffs, a sort of left-field Devil Movie.  The Son of Satan is in a jar in a church basement, having been left there by the Catholic Church sometime after Jesus came from outer space to try to warn everybody they should have left it buried.  A team of physicists, biologists, and a theologian set up tons of computer equipment to try to figure out what to do but wind up bumbling around a bit.  Several great gags land and throw you out of your seat but several others really don't land and leave you a bit perplexed.  Donald Pleasence and Victor Wong hold the movie together but the actual leads are merely adequate (Jameson Parker, the blond guy from Simon and Simon, if you're an '80s TV kid; and Lisa Blount, who seems to have done a great deal of '80s television herself and died an untimely death at age 53).

It strikes me that the cast might be part of the problem: not the talent, which is fine, but the size.  When characters start dying off, it's not like you felt you spent enough time with any of them to care as much, and the two you care about most (Wong's physicist and Pleasence's Priest, who doesn't even have a name according to the credits, being listed simply as "Priest") don't have quite enough screen time (and only Pleasence's character ever really seems to be in any real danger, in a scene that drags on ludicrously long and ultimately gets a little sillier than scary).  The ensemble in The Thing is tight enough for you to have feelings for the characters, ditto (say for instance) the ensembles in Alien and Aliens.  Prince of Darkness's ensemble just seems unwieldy to me.

There's also, possibly, a paradox in the movie looking just a little too good, a little too clean.  Maybe that's just me, but it seems like Carpenter's early low-budget outings have a kind of grit to them that helps sell the verisimilitude and immediacy even when the sets or makeup or effects might be a little lacking.  Prince of Darkness looks like a movie, which isn't really a compliment in this case. 

Also, I'm just not sure bugs are really as ooky as Carpenter possibly thinks they are based on this and Halloween III: Season of the Witch.  I mean, okay, somebody turning into bugs and their clothes collapsing because they became a bugperson is kinda ooky, but also I sort of felt bad for any beetles harmed in the making of this film because they were under an actor's foot.  Also also, the bugs are supposed to be doing a whole foreshadowing thing and/or conveying the increased presence of Son of Satan/Satan in this dimension, but it doesn't really land; the audience, I guess, is supposed to take it as a given that bugs = evil = Satan but that only really works if bugs scare you and you think they're evil.  It's kinda the cinematic equivalent of an old AIP or Universal movie having a spider crawl across a dinner table in a crumbling mansion or castle to convey ookiness and instead conveying that they don't have a small insect infestation problem or leaving to wonder what a tarantula is even doing that far north.

Anyway.

Oh, the soundtrack is awesome.  Of course it is.