Prince of Darkness

David Sims4.5

imo they shouldn't have opened the big scary cylinder

SilentDawn5.0

100 John Carpenter's Ultimate Achievement. Contains an intellectual affect of Halloween's abstraction of Evil, an interior distortion of the exterior sieges in Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, and Ghosts of Mars, and an unquantifiable visual model for the broken parameters surrounding our existence. In Prince of Darkness, The Shape is not just omnipresent and conscious like he is in Haddonfield, donning a white mask, but ancient and rooted in the unknown reality of the world, swirling and cascading against the physical structures in which it easily surmounts. What we fear and what we question - mirrors, sex, death, the emotional discontinuity of our bodies in relation to each other, the possibility of life beyond - is effortlessly conquered by Him, a being who knows all and is unfazed by our triviality, our personal stake in worthlessness. A rare work of art that dares to wrestle with not just who or what we are, but our complete lack of comprehension. Carpenter's film is a masterwork in all the traditional aspects; the hallways that seem to take on a solar system in and of themselves and yet still ensnare; the synth-score hard-wired to your pulse; the evidence of the physical world always against us, of being utterly alone; the group dynamics beginning as a community before slowly losing their unification, breaking off into scattered remnants; the smooth, seemingly controlled-by-a-wave steadicam, stumbling forward like a zombie on rollerskates etc. But the reasoning behind its grand achievement is that it combines Carpenter's greatest strengths with a genuine inquisitive sorrow. He's looking to scare because he's scared too. Aren't we all?

Sean Fennessey4.5

Not Carpenter’s best, but maybe his best idea: a stripped-down vision of the battle between theoretical science and spiritual evil, rendered by the ignored homeless schizophrenics of Los Angeles, a swarm of bugs, and a bunch of yuppie intellectuals who become fodder for Satanic possession. (The metaphors aren’t shaded.) The swirling green cylinder is one of the most striking images in Carpenter’s career, one part EC Comics ooky horror, one part mystery box, one part punk rock talisman. With a dash of quantum mechanics. There are long stretches of mostly wide shots animating the pure terror of slow industrial death, two figures far apart in the frame, separated by wealth or belief or something more cosmic and uncontrollable. Like Fritz Lang adapting Lovecraft. HALLOWEEN-THE FOG-ESCAPE-THE THING is rightly recognized as his apex, cerebral and metaphorical jags on the banality and recklessness of evil. But the ritualistic, genre-freighted BIG TROUBLE-PRINCE OF DARKNESS-THEY LIVE mystical doom triad isn’t that far behind. STARMAN and CHRISTINE are the glue—steady, slightly more conventional studio pictures binding these extraordinary periods of creativity. Nine movies in 10 years, nary a dud among them, each riven with new ideas and purpose. What a decade.