Prince of Darkness (1987, John Carpenter) (Patreon)

56/100

Second viewing, last seen during its original theatrical release. Since I'm having trouble coming up with a thesis about why this film doesn't entirely work for me, let's try the note-annotation method, for which a number of folks expressed their enthusiasm. (Once again, I'm transcribing verbatim what I jotted down on my phone as I watched. Didn't make any notes about Carpenter's score, which works here like the mortar holding bricks together but also sounds a lot like the one he wrote for Big Trouble in Little China, the soundtrack to which I've owned since 1986. Nor did I think to describe any memorable widescreen compositions, which for a Carpenter film is to some degree damning in and of itself.) 

• New record 34 years (The Deep 33, 1977 to 2010) confirm though

Right before I hit play, a truly horrific thought invaded my currently politics-addled brain: The last time I saw Prince of Darkness, incoming Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff had not yet been born. (This turned out to be not quite true—Ossoff was born on 16 February 1987, and I'd have seen the film around eight months later. But still.) Tried to think of whether I've ever gone longer between a first and second viewing; The Deep (which I saw at age nine) sprang to mind, but I rewatched that a decade ago, with a gap of only 33 years. Checked my logs and the only other contenders were movies I'd watched many times on cable as a kid, e.g. The In-Laws and Nine to Five. However, Dune may break the record, should it either win the poll or be randomly selected over the next couple of years. (Seems quite possible, given Villeneuve's impending adaptation.) 

• Anne Howard

Early in his career, Carpenter shepherded some superb performances from little-known actors; Austin Stoker and Laurie Zimmer, for example, contribute a lot to my love for Assault on Precinct 13. Not so much the case here, in my opinion, though I looked up Howard because her zombie death stare after Susan gets possessed (she's the first "Satanade is Thirst-Aid" victim) genuinely gave me the willies. Our surviving heroes, on the other hand, remain disappointingly bland, with Jameson Parker in particular a real black hole of charisma. In theory, I admire the film's ending, but its terrible sacrifice would hit a whole lot harder were there any chemistry at all between the two lovers. Even Pleasance seems to be mostly going through the motions.

• The Thing

Don't clearly remember why I made this note, to be honest. Maybe it occurred to me at some point that Prince of Darkness is another Carpenter film about a group of scientists (mostly) who are isolated from the larger world (in this case simply because the building has been surrounded by mind-controlled homeless schizophrenics) and then duplicated/inhabited one by one by some hostile entity (though there's no effort made here to mimic human behavior, hence no uncertainty about who's been corrupted and who hasn't). Can't say I'm especially bothered by the familiarity—and I'm not a huge fan of The Thing in any case (one of my less popular opinions), so it's not as if I perceive this as a lesser rehash—but nothing exactly leaps out as innovative, either. In general, my "meh" reaction is less about the presence of notable flaws than about the absence of notable virtues.

• Variable freakiness

As close as I got to articulating my mild frustration. Because the characters are uniformly shallow, and the narrative amounts to a single-location Satanic zombie takeover (just now realized it's more or less a po-faced cousin of The Evil Dead), Prince of Darkness winds up being no more or less effective than are its individual horror setpieces. That sort of thing can be highly subjective, and I can imagine someone else being not a bit unnerved by Susan's aforementioned lack of affect—could look silly if you're unreceptive; I happen to be very susceptible to disquieting impassivity, which is why the scariest part of Paranormal Activity to me is just time-lapse footage of a woman standing motionless beside her bed for hours—while getting a lot more creeped out than I did by all the bugs and maggots and so forth. Or by Alice Cooper and his bicycle-impalement routine. The cylinder of swirling demonic goop remains a potent image, whereas Possessed Lisa speed-typing "I Live!" a zillion times somehow lacks the nightmarish quality of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." (The alternating line breaks on that '80s computer screen do not help.) Some stuff worked for me and some just didn't.

• Transmission from 1999

One thing that did work, eventually, was the recurring dreamscape message from what was then the future, which I knew I recognized from somewhere other than having seen the movie exactly once 34 years earlier but could not for the life of me place. Distressed audio and video reliably gets under my skin, and while the "Brotherhood of Sleep" feels irrelevant for a good long while, its payoff lands beautifully. Or at least it would have had Carpenter not felt the need to goose it with a barely-related jump scare microseconds later. (See "variable freakiness.") Even before we learn the shadowy figure's identity, though, just the distorted voice made me anxious. And had done so for what seemed like ages. Where had I heard that before?

• Black dude Amazing Grace

Won't make a federal case of it, but one can't help but think that a contemporary remake wouldn't choose to have its sole African-American character respond to being satanically possessed by weeping and singing a hymn and then cutting his own throat, while everyone else who goes to the dark side acts utterly robotic. I get that Calder's meant to be admirable—he's struggling in vain to resist the evil—but the disparity feels a tad Magical. 

• Differential equations what relevance?

Like, huh? What's ultimately the point of having Birack and his students observe that the ancient text associated with the cylinder includes advanced math that hadn't yet been worked out by humanity? Sounds cool when it's mentioned, but plays no role whatsoever in anything that happens. I guess we're just supposed to be taken aback that functions and derivatives started out as obscure tools of Lucifer. 

• DJ FUCKING SHADOW

That's where I knew the 1999 transmission from! (Nine years passed between seeing the movie and buying Endtroducing... so I never made the connection.) Thanks, Wikipedia.