The Prince of Terror (1988)

Original title: Il maestro del terrore

Warning: there’s no way to talk about the good bits of this one without some heavy last act spoilers!

Popular horror movie director Vincent Omen (Tomas Arana), dubbed “The Prince of Terror” by what I can only assume is movie Earth’s version of Fangoria, has an on-set falling out with his regular scriptwriter, Paul Hilary (David Brandon) and gets the man fired rather ruthlessly.

A dinner that very same night in the villa out in the sticks where Vincent lives with his wife Betty (Carole André) and his teenage daughter Susan (Joyce Pitti) is rudely interrupted by prank phone calls and a golf ball on the dinner table. Later, in an ever so tiny escalation, Susan finds her lapdog skinned in her bedroom. So everyone runs to their car and drives off to the next police station. No, wait, of course not. Rather, Susan cries, her parents shrug, and Vincent puts the dead dog into the trash.

Obviously, the dead dog is only the beginning of a night of terror. Vincent has apparently a gift for pissing people off, for Paul the angry writer has teamed up with an actor named Eddie Felsen (Ulisse Minervini) who was injured making one of Vincent’s films and is now your regular movie maniac. Together, they drive the family through various special effects horror set pieces Vincent once excised from Paul’s scripts. In-between, there’s ponderous yet nonsensical musing about the nature of horror, and the old “was it real, or not?” gambit repeated about a dozen times, until Vincent uses his golfing-based superpowers. Also, he might be the devil.

This is one of a series of four movies Lamberto Bava made for Italian television at the end of the 80s. He brought other Italian horror mainstays with him to the project, so here you get a script in the inimitable manner of Dardano Sacchetti (that is, it makes very little sense but seems to make a lot of it in the writer’s mind, and is all the better for it), a score by Simon Boswell, and effects by Sergio Stivaletti. Apparently, Italian TV was surprisingly okay with the gloopy gory bits you’d hope for from Stivaletti, so there’s at least that to look forward to for everyone.

Otherwise, this is certainly not on the level of Lamberto Bava’s best cinematic outings, but it is a fun enough movie once the viewer has decided to enter the proper mind space for its specific type of Italian horror, which means giving up on ideas of logic or proper causality and opening up to the random void, while holding back the parts of one’s personality that might want to watch this thing ironically. It’s not terribly difficult, actually, for Bava does know how to make his TV budget look surprisingly pretty, putting quite a bit of effort into making the the architecture of Omen’s home at once sexy and strange (or at least somewhat confusing).

I could have lived rather well without the whole “what’s true horror?” angle in the dialogue, though there are some peculiar lines in the English dub that will at least make the viewer ponder the nature of the drugs the writer was on (probably just wine, I know, I know). But then, Bava clearly wants to do some ratcheting up of tension like in a proper thriller, so the film needs its slow moments, structurally, and there’s little filmmakers like to talk about more than the philosophy of filmmaking.

The real meat of the movie is of course its insane climax, when Vincent first golfs Eddie’s brains out (seriously), then breaks Paul’s wrist – and apparently spirit – with a billiard variation on golf, and drives off with his family while Paul encounters Vincent’s supernatural powers beyond golfing. See the dead dog’s trash bag move! See Eddie move and puke out a stream of golf balls! Share Paul’s panicked sense of logical disconnect! Be happier than you were before seeing any of this (unlike Paul, who is now most probably dead)! And if that still isn’t enough, try to imagine this thing as a parallel universe sequel to The Omen, taking place in a world where Damien has become such a big Vincent Price fan, he stole his first name and went to Hollywood.