One Green Bottle (of Ultimate Evil)

I’m not sure anyone would describe John Carpenter as one of cinema’s great stylists, but it’s certainly the case that many of his films, particularly the ones from the later 1980s, have a kind of distinctive collective identity. Perhaps this is just a generous way of saying that they all look and feel pretty much the same. The cinematography is the same, the acting is the same (indeed, many of the casts are frequently largely the same), the music is the same, and the scripts are often the same – collections of genre tropes occasionally given a pulpy new spin.

Carpenter’s 1987 film Prince of Darkness is a bit of an outlier, on the last point at least. The premise of this film is a bit out there, even by Carpenter’s standards, and the way in which it is developed somehow results in a film which consistently feels completely bonkers. Certainly there is very little sense of a connection between the narrative elements which appear in the opening scenes of the movie: there are various ominous, suggestive images, some get-to-know-you scenes involving a quantum physics professor (Victor Wong) and his students, and an elderly Catholic priest is found dead by one of his colleagues (Donald Pleasence, who was practically a Carpenter regular by this point).

It turns out the dead priest was the guardian of a derelict monastery in downtown Los Angeles, which belonged to an old and secretive (but still very influential) order of monks known as the Brotherhood of Sleep. In the cellar of the monastery the priest finds what looks like a large glass cylinder filled with swirling green slime. (The cylinder is surrounded by dozens of candles, but who has been keeping them lit is one mystery the film opts not to investigate.) Pleasence gets onto Wong and his team and invites them all to come to the monastery for a few days so they can do a proper investigation of the cylinder and its contents.

So far, so… well, it is a bit odd, but the film has barely got started yet. After the investigators move in and set up, the monastery is surrounded by an army of insect-infested schizophrenic homeless people who kill anyone attempting to leave (one of the more prominent is played by Alice Cooper, who at one point manages the neat trick of impaling someone on a bicycle). The ancient books around the cylinder turn out to contain modern equations, and a warning that the green slime is actually the embodiment of Satan. Green slime Satan is actually the offspring of ‘Anti-God’, an intelligence of pure evil which resides in a universe of anti-matter which can be accessed using mirrors as portals. Jesus Christ, you may be interested to learn, was a space traveller who came to Earth to warn about the danger of releasing green slime Satan from its captivity, but ended up being misunderstood. Catholic teachings on the nature of evil have (perhaps understandably) got all this a bit mixed up and conflated pure evil as a spiritual concept with the less traditional notion that pure evil is a swirly green slime.

As you might expect, slime-Satan finds a way out of its glassy prison and ‘infects’ one of the monitoring team, naturally without anyone noticing it. Soon enough the uninfected scientists find themselves having to fend off their possessed colleagues, as leaving the building is obviously not an option (due to the mob of homicidal homeless people hanging around outside). Green slime Satan is looking to create a suitable host body so it can bring Anti-God into the real world.

The film’s curious elision of a flavour of science fiction with supernatural horror, coupled with the fact that the script is credited to one Martin Quatermass (actually Carpenter himself working under a pseudonym), makes it fairly clear what was going on here: Carpenter is paying tribute (or making a homage, if you will) to Nigel Kneale, estimable British scriptwriter of – most pertinently in this case – Quatermass and the Pit and The Stone Tape (whose path Carpenter had crossed a few years earlier when they both contributed to Halloween III). This being a Carpenter script, it is not really up to the same standard of intelligence and subtlety as either of those: Carpenter is much more in love with hitting the audience’s revulsion reflex trigger than Kneale ever was. The charitable might say that it is clearly meant as an affectionate act of homage (in much the same way that Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers also seems to owe a clear debt to Quatermass and the Pit) to an influential figure in the genre. Kneale himself, characteristically enough, was not in the mood to be charitable: the kind of homage one could do without, he sniffed – the use of the Quatermass name was highly regrettable, as it might lead the uninformed to conclude that Kneale had had something to do with the script. You can see his point.

The story never quite coheres or convinces in the manner of the films this is seeking to emulate, with the result that it just comes across as a bizarre mixture of outlandish pseudo-scientific notions and schlocky pulp horror tropes: almost as if, before making Hellraiser, Clive Barker had read A Brief History of Time. It has been suggested that on some level the film is a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic which was concerning many people at the time it was made: the possession-effect is spread by people spraying bodily fluids (usually saliva) at each other, while at one point a character who has previously alluded to being gay finds himself menaced by two (female) characters who have been taken over; naturally, he hides in a cupboard. Quite how many levels his ‘Help! I’m trapped in the closet!’ line is meant to work on is not clear: this is not the sort of level you would generally expect a Carpenter film to work on.

But in general this is business as usual for a late 80s Carpenter movie – it has a couple of character actors in it you may have heard of (Donald Pleasence does his stuff here, but rather seems to be going through the motions), but most of the main cast is quite anonymous, the script kind of hangs together and has the occasional good moment (there’s a subplot about prophetic dreams the cast are having, as a result of tachyon transmissions from the year 1999, or something, which is moderately creepy), and on the whole the movie just kind of bulls its way along, content to be a mid-budget genre movie. Like practically every Carpenter film made after 1982, you look at Prince of Darkness and wonder what happened to the guy who made Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Thing: he was someone who really knew how to make a movie. The John Carpenter who made this is a journeyman – one capable of the occasional inspired flourish, but nothing more substantial than that.