Long regarded as John Carpenter’s first outright failure, Prince of Darkness is perhaps the greatest satanic horror story-by-way-of-quantum physics ever put to film. Which doesn’t, admittedly, make it all that great. But what’s lacking in Carpenter’s wacked-out thriller – decent...

Carpenter's first low-budget horror pic for some time. Summoned to an abandoned church by a frightened priest (Pleasence), Prof Birack (Wong) finds a basement s

Deep in the crypts beneath the old church, the Sleeper has been waiting for years. For 2,000 years, to be precise, ever since Christ came to Earth to warn us of its existence. It is Absolute Evil, and now its time has come again. Here it is now, green and amorphous, whirling around inside the giant glass tube like zucchini in a blender. The tube is locked, but X-rays reveal that it is locked...from the inside.

The Great Satan doesn't just reside in man's heart of darkness. Instead he lives in an opposite dimension, and manifests himself in this world in. . .bugs. That's about the extent of the horror that John Carpenter conjures up in Prince of Darkness.

Sometimes, a little poverty can be an improving thing. John Carpenter`s film-making skills have been evident since he first surfaced with his low-budget productions of ”Dark Star,” ”Assault on Precinct 13” and”Halloween,” but as his success has grown, his budgets have swelled, too. In such films as ”The Thing” and ”Big Trouble in Little China,” […]