Quantum mechanics meet demonic possession in John Carpenter’s independently-released return to horror, following a brief flirtation with other genres. In _Prince of Darkness_, he depicts a class of university physics students who enter a boarded-up church to observe the jar of swirling, simmering fluid in its basement. The team soon discovers another disturbing pool of liquid on the ceiling and, after one participant accidentally swallows a mouthful (don’t ask), commence to spitting hot, jetting streams of it at one another. This turns out to be a method of mind control, the devil’s means of enacting his evil plans, but Satan isn’t the only one pulling strings from another dimension. When they fall asleep (which is shockingly often, considering the amount of screaming and spitting), the crew share dreams of warning and premonition. Time-skipping admonitions, we learn, from the year 1999.

That sounds like a *lot* of crazy conceptual fireworks, but it’s only scratching the surface. I haven’t even touched upon the acknowledged AIDS metaphors or the idea of Jesus Christ as an extraterrestrial. Carpenter must’ve intended this premise to serve as a multi-functional merging point between science and religion, a bizarre form of information processing for all the high-minded thoughts he found in that month’s news broadcasts and specialty magazines. It covers a wide range of conspiratorial silliness, compelling enough to merit a second thought but ridiculous enough to quickly dismiss and move on with one’s life. Or one’s plot, as it were, since most of the scintillating bits are abandoned almost as soon as they’re introduced. For all its wild n’ wacky ideas, _Prince of Darkness_ is surprisingly dry. The necessary exposition takes an hour to get through and, in the end, it all resolves into a stock-standard case of kill or be killed anyway. The devil’s possessions, it seems, are most effective in bugs and homeless people (including special guest star Alice Cooper, who stabs a man to death with a bicycle), but each cast member does more than their share of standing around and looking vaguely uncomfortable.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of too many cooks in the kitchen. There’s something interesting stewing under the surface here, but Carpenter has loaded the script with so many competing ideas that it’s tough to focus on any one particular degree of insanity. By the closing act, I felt like I’d skimmed the lot of them, eager to move past the thematic heavy lifting and get on with the freaky finale already. Kooky and creative, but overripe and often downright boring.