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Prince of Darkness

Prince of Darkness

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Very Scary!
Review: This is a rather scary and faulty movie. Nothing in this is biblically correct, but it still manages to scare, regardless to how absurd the film is. Perfect to watch with The Omen and Rosemary's Baby. Watch it alone in the dark.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: No Longer in Production! on DVD!!
Review: What a crime! Someone needs to get the ball rolling! I want this so bad with all the extras! Hell, if they ever get around to producing this again might as well do it right! Oh and by the way...how about a sequal.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Amazing movie for its time!!! The present and future to come
Review: This movie, it's soundtrack, direction, production and yes even the acting stands on its own. No fancy affects to rest upon. The concept of the storyline keeps the movie going. The first 15 minutes or so contains very little dialogue and carries the viewer through on soundtrack and visualization. I desperately await a part two to this as it leaves itself open for one. I doubt it will come. The great ones like this never do and I suppose it is for the best, why take a chance on something that most likely would only pale in comparison.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Why is thid DVD out-of-print???????
Review: One of these deliciously excellent horror/science fiction genre films that only Carpenter succeds in concocting. A true classic of this underexplored genre (with zombies, physicists, messages from the future, axe murders, and if that's not enough for you...Satan Himself!) Small budgets never impeded John Carpenter's furious imagination! Why such classics are not in continuous reprint remains a mystery to this DVD consumer!!! Buy it when it gets reprinted.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Along with "The Exorcist" and "Rosemary's Baby"...
Review: ... one of the greatest movies starring Satan, and the darkest one. But it's also the only one studying him, trying to explain his past and origins. Carpenter's characters are a physics professor and his students; helped by a worried priest (Donald Pleasence), they soon have to face the Devil's son, in an abandoned church. This time the evil has the form of a green, phosphorescent fluid, keeping turnind coldly in a closed cylindre, before escaping and contamining the sudents, one after the other, in order to set his father free, to release him to the world.

Even if the success's run away from Carpenter (his raving previous film, "Big Trouble in Little China", just failed real bad), the filmmaker didn't lose his great cinematic art. He tells us an astonishing story taking place in a closed building (like in some others of his best movies, especially "Assault on Precinct 13"), showing a handful of characters desperately alone in front of the pure, absolute evil. He also suggests that there's another world in the other side of the mirror, an evil universe, opposite to ours, where we can't live, and that what we see in the mirror is not only its reflection, but also its negative. Why not? The sure thing is, what's in the other side of the mirror is ugly, awful. And of course, the movie is rather pessimistic and very scary (just see the threatening movelessness of the evil characters, as usual with Carpenter), much more to the so-called horror movies made in Teen-Hollywood. John Carpenter is now the last valuable horror movie maker, the only one able to make movies like this.

We'll notice the rocker Alice Cooper, surprising as a bum waiting for his master: Satan!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Along with "The Exorcist" and "Rosemary's Baby"...
Review: ... one of the greatest movies starring Satan, and the darkest one. But it's also the only one studying him, trying to explain his past and origins. Carpenter's characters are a physics professor - Victor Wong, lately deceased - and his students (among them, Jameson Parker, Lisa Blount and Dennis Dun); helped by a worried priest (Donald Pleasence), they soon have to face the Devil's son, in an abandoned church. This time the evil has the form of a green, phosphorescent fluid, keeping turnind coldly in a closed canister, before escaping and contamining the students, making them 'his' zombies, one after the other, in order to set his father free, to release him to the world.

Even if the success's run away from Carpenter (his raving previous film, "Big Trouble in Little China", just failed real bad), the filmmaker didn't lose his great cinematic art. He tells us an astonishing story taking place in a closed building (like in some others of his best movies, especially "Assault on Precinct 13"), showing a handful of characters desperately alone in front of the pure, absolute evil. He also suggests that there's another world in the other side of the mirror, an evil universe, opposite to ours, where we can't live, and that what we see in the mirror is not only its reflection, but also its negative. Why not? The sure thing is, what's in the other side of the mirror is awful, horrible. And of course, the movie is rather pessimistic and very scary (just see the threatening movelessness of the evil characters, as usual with Carpenter), much more to the so-called horror - in fact, funny, not scary at all - movies made in Teen-Hollywood. John Carpenter is now the last valuable horror movie maker, the only one able to make movies like this. He's also - and no matter what many people think and say - one of the best American directors now.

"Prince of Darkness" is Carpenter's key movie. We can find in it most of his themes and obsessions: the Evil, present everywhere, in everything, in everybody, existing in the smallest part of anything, but invisible; the closing and claustrophobia, with some characters locked up, facing bad elements with no possibility to escape (the church, like the police station in "Assault of Precinct 13", is a new place attacked from the outside and threatened in the inside), and the ambiguous role of the Church itself (here, religion and belief have only a small part in the final victory of man versus the Devil). The fact that the DVD of this horror masterpiece is no longer on sale is not very surprising; like most of Carpenter's movies such as "They live", it's too strange, too dark, too scary, too pessimistic for some people in charge - with no conventional ending made as a gimmick for a sequel; on the contrary, the final scene is terrible, printing itself on the viewer's eye for ever.

We'll notice the rocker Alice Cooper, surprising as an evil, frightening bum waiting for his master: Satan!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: An odd film, but a must for sci-fi fans
Review: A pokey, low-budget zombie movie grounded in equal parts theoretical science and mystical mumbo-jumbo, _Prince of Darkness_ has acquired a cult following among sci-fi fans. Like many cult movies, the film suffers from a surfeit of ideas, most of which don't get the exploration they deserve. Despite the film's generally cerebral tone, its climax packs a surprising punch. Not a great film, even by Carpenter's B-movie standards ... but definitely worth a look.

Director John Carpenter penned the script under the pseudonym "Martin Quatermass," in an homage to 1950s British sci-fi cinema. If _Prince of Darkness_ is your cup of tea, you may want to check out _Quatermass and the Pit_.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Satan vs. Physics students, Carpenter style.
Review: Having loved the films of John Carpenter since childhood, I feel highly qualified to review this mid-level effort from America's'b'-movie maverick. Not as efficient as 1978's 'Halloween', not as accomplished as 1982's gory remake of 'The Thing', 'Prince of Darkness' is in fact an entertaining and occasionally riveting horror-thriller from a director who specializes in making old-fashioned genre pictures. Far from being the bomb some have deemed it, it is simply a mildly disappointing fright film. Perhaps a little too talky, perhaps void of explosive confrontations between the Devil and mankind like some expected, it is still a handsomely produced and perfectly scored (by Carpenter) entry in the auteur's career.
The acting is passable, the photography moody and memorable, and the whole idea of a team of Physics geeks battling an anti-God in a church basement is pretty novel(!) Thank Carpenter for the clever script(he wrote it under a pen-name) the pounding and relentless soundtrack, and the sure-handed direction. Not his best, but far from his worst, 'Darkness' is worth checking out even if you don't have unconditional love for Carpenter(as I do).

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Intelligent, Scary, and Underrated....
Review: It baffles me why some critics have been so vitriolic in their reviews of this film. It's vintage Carpenter: eerie and memorable score, atmospheric cinematography, a steady sense of dread and tension, and a truly interesting plotline: a group of graduate students are recruited by their professor (Victor Wong) into spending a weekend in an abandoned L.A. church to study an ancient canister discovered in the building's basement. A secret diary reveals that a mysterious sect of priests were committed to safeguarding the canister and its contents. Well, turns out the last of the group just croaked, and the "thing" inside the bottle is actually Satan's spirit. And he's getting antsy and wants out. In a bad way. Uh-oh....

This films has a very interesting premise. We've heard time and time again about the Second Coming of Christ. "Prince of Darkness" puts a decidedly more sinister spin on things. The film consistently maintains the claustrophobic dread that Carpenter was famous for, and the cast (especially Pleasence in a nice come-back role,and Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount as lovers in a surprisingly touching subplot) are all excellent. Granted, this is B-movie cheese, but it's extremely well-made B movie cheese. Give John Carpenter some credit. If the critics truly want to savage a flick of his, they oughta watch "VAMPIRES" or "ESCAPE FROM L.A." While "Prince of Darkness" isn't his best (that title goes to "Halloween" and "The Fog") it deserves an honorable mention. Give it a chance, and you won't be disappointed.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: John Carpenter, What Happened?.
Review: This is a very bad, amateurish looking film. Parts of it look as if it were filmed as a made for TV film. It's god awful and not a single frame of it is even remotely scary or intense. The acting, besides Donald Pleasence, is awful. John Carpenter used to be so good. He simply lost his touch with this monster turkey. Avoid at all costs.


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