Carpenter Week: Prince of Darkness

Hey kiddies!  Back again with a creep factor of about 6 with our next Carpenter flick and boy o boy it is a doozy.   Wouldn’t you know it that this all happened because of grad students, scientists and their pesky priest?   Grab some popcorn, invite some friends and dare to look away.   This is Prince of Darkness.

Spoilers walk the Earth!!!

A priest (Donald Pleasence of The Great Escape, You Only Live Twice, Buried Alive, Escape From New York, Halloween 1,2,4,5, and 6) doesn’t go into a bar but actually conducts a lecture with a gathering of students and renown Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong of Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, Year of the Dragon, Big Trouble in Little China, The Golden Child, The Last Emperor and Bloodsport) meet together in the basement of a disused church in Los Angeles.   The priest requires and humbly requests their expertise investigating a mysterious cylinder contain a swirling green liquid.  The metaphysics student Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker of Callie and Son, Simon &Simon, The Legend of Prince Valiant, Have You Seen My Son, Something Borrowed, Something Blue and JAG) feels confident that they will crack the case of the cylinder of potential doom.  Careful research of the text with the cylinder translates to the essence of the Anti-Christ.  Yeah damnation in a bottle and I though Axe was bad.   So of course we cannot pack it up there and split, no our team has to conduct a variant of experiments to see if we can quantify evil.  

Over a period of two days, small spurts of the liquid manage to escape the cylinder and start possessing the students one at a time trying to wipe out everything in its path.   The survivors are barracked in the church and an army of hobos also possessed are looking for any potential escapees.   So let’s bunk down into the deconsecrated church and hope for the best.   Each survivor shares a recurring dream, a message from the future if you will, explaining the world’s end in from the far away time of 1999.

As this lunacy is being deciphered, student Kelly is absorbed by the remaining liquid and creating the Anti-Christ.  A hideous, maimed figure that seems to regenerate any damage inflicted by human and also has a high concentration of telekinesis and brother she is ticked off.     The Anti-God demands to be brought into the mortal world and that’s what Anti-Christ Kelly is all about via second act.   Can our haphazard scientists, students and priest stop the madness that will engulf the world or will they be too late?

With the capable hands of FX gurus Mark Shostrom (The Boys Next Door, From Beyond, Evil Dead II, Phantasm II, Dick Tracy and Star Trek: Generations) and Kevin Quibell (Starman, The Running Man, Black Rain, Speed, Twister and Hard Rain) the creature FX, Visual and prosthetics look believable, eerie and downright nasty.  Anti-Christ Kelly about made me want to run fleeing for the hills or possibly skip lunch.    Proof is in the pudding as they say and thus far Carpenter proves he can do scary, gore, humor and a bit of sci-fi.  Have a happy folks and keep the lights on for this one while you watch it.