Feeling in a John Carpenter mood again, I watched Prince of Darkness tonight. It has to be one of his weirder movies.
Carpenter wrote it under the pseudonym "Martin Quatermass." This gives a hint to his attentions, as elements of the plot do seem inspired by Nigel Kneale's British teleplays featuring the scientist hero, especially Quatermass and the Pit. The monster that menaces the church full of grad students and Donald Pleasence's priest is really cosmic entropy, although it may collaborate with/impersonate the Devil. Victor Wong's character basically is Professor Quatermass, except Asian-American.
While there's a small army of scary homeless people led by Alice Cooper, I don't know that I'd call this an actor-driven movie. Which might be why most of the cast have if anything gotten more obscure since the movie was released a quarter century ago, and is definitely why the leading man prompts the thought "preppie porn star" every time he's onscreen.
But Carpenter is playing an interesting game here. The scenes are all very short, accompanied by a relentless electronic score. Seemingly calm at first, they come to evoke a creepy sense of things falling apart.
2 comments:
Even though I know we watched 'Prince of Darkness' in the past couple of years I can't say I remembered it well enough not to have to remind myself by looking at the trailer and reading the premise. Donald Pleasence was always intense in any role we've seen him perform and this one gave him great scope for his ominous declarations. The container filled with the mysterious slimey green stuff was memorable and so were the mirrors as entries to an alternate world.
I hadn't heard about 'Martin Quatermass' previously, but now that I have and have read the story of 'Quatermass and the Pit' I understand what you meant when you compared the story and Professor Black with the character. It actually sounded like a pretty entertaining movie - and tv series. Funny it never gained popularity outside of England like 'Dr. Who' did. In truth 'The Pit' movie sounds like it may have dealt with the subject of ancient evil returning than did 'The Prince of Darkness'.
It's funny you watched a Carpenter film likely on the same night we watched a recent amazon prime movie called 'The Tomorrow War' at the end of which my reaction was that movies have gone downhill since Carpenter's day. 'The Thing' was great and so were others, my favorite of his 80s movies was 'They Live'.
I've come to appreciate Carpenter for marching to the beat of his own drummer. I'm sure he wants/wanted his movies to make money, and even if he didn't care his investors would. But he still does the movies he wants to do, by and large the way he wants to do them. So this dark cosmic horror story sounded like an interesting thing to watch him do. Pleasence does indeed get to sink his teeth into a juicy character, a kind of beleaguered priest.
I know the Quatermass teleplays/movies more by reputation than anything else, but I have seen the movie version of "The Pit," which I watched one night at Nanna's house. Didn't get all of it but it seemed to be swinging for the fences. It's true that they didn't penetrate to American audiences, with a few exceptions. Of course Americans mostly didn't know Doctor Who until Tom Baker's time, and for a long time he was the only one they knew.
The Thing was magnificently paranoid and made great use of the claustrophobic setting. I remember enjoying They Live as well. As for The Tomorrow War I haven't seen it but it seems a shame they had to make an actual movie. The synopsis I've read is so awesomely silly it seems impossible to live up to.
Post a Comment