Prophecy

Rating:
Summary: A Leftist Laughfest
Review: John Frankenheimer's 1979 horror film "Prophecy" falls squarely into that nauseating Hollywood genre called "The Message Film." Dimly aware that their own lives are essentially shallow and meaningless, Tinseltown's movers and shakers often seek to find value in areas of life that they know nothing about. One only need witness the blatant ignorance spewed by the Hollywood elite over such issues as gun control, capital punishment, and U.S. foreign policy to understand that films like "Prophecy" serve as a way of trying to educate the ignorant American herd. Perhaps we should experience a modicum of sympathy for these adrift souls; after all, it is difficult to remember how the world really works when you live in a mansion, endure the blind admiration of millions of dimwits, and spend your waking hours constantly mollycoddled by security guards and a phalanx of publicity personnel. Frankenheimer's film definitely isn't the only effort at fusing La-La Land's intellectual impotence with the need for instructing the swarming lumpen, but it is probably one of the more overweening efforts I have recently seen.

"Prophecy" represents Hollywood's unshakable belief of the 1970s that corporate America would destroy the environment through wide spread pollution and greed. That this eventuality has yet to occur doesn't bother these people in the least, as there exist plenty of other causes, both real and imaginary, to occupy their short attention spans. Starring Talia Shire and Robert Foxworth, "Prophecy" tells the story of a doctor and his musician wife who accept a mission to go out into the wilderness in order to monitor a conflict between a paper mill and some local Indians. The indigenous population in this area rages over some disturbing health problems plaguing their people, and the paper mill wants to continue to use the forests to make their product without the interference of these locals. Both sides come to blows over the problems, so the good doctor and his wife must mediate a solution that will discover the source of the difficulties and come up with a workable solution. It isn't too long after arriving, though, that the physician notices that the wildlife in the area exhibit strange signs of mutation. He sees huge fish, a tadpole the size of a bullfrog, and hears rumors about an Indian legend stalking the inhabitants of the region. Predictably, this "legend" turns out to be a mutated beast, a cross between a bear and, well, something. The film concludes with a series of panicky treks through the forest in search of help as the monster picks off people with impunity.

I could go on and on about the laughable biases that emerge with frightening regularity throughout this film. Most notable are Foxworth and Shire in the lead roles. These two are hilarious! Foxworth, as the caring inner city doctor Robert Verne, comes across with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. He has the moral outrage of Alan Alda, looks like Robert Reed of "The Brady Bunch" fame, and the annoying "sensitivity" of Mike Farrell. In order to set up his character at the beginning of the film, we see Verne racing into a ghetto slum to attend to a baby bitten by a rat. When the mother laments the heartlessness of the absentee owner for allowing such abysmal conditions to exist, Verne glares with the steely intensity of Clint Eastwood as he scowls his commiseration with this unfortunate wretch. After watching this scene, you just know Verne's a hero because HE CARES, DARN IT! It's a good thing that the evil owners of that paper mill really poisoned the environment because if they didn't Verne wouldn't have a moral outrage to stand on. Thank goodness for moral outrage!

Verne isn't an untainted saint, though. "Prophecy" lets us know this truth when we discover that his wife, Maggie, is pregnant despite her husband's adamant opposition to having a child. Robert Verne has seen such suffering in his life that he simply cannot bear to bring another mouth into this world. Her husband's position on this matter troubles Maggie to no end, so much so that towards the beginning of the film we see a feminist telling her that it is up to a woman whether she wants a baby or not. This situation informs one of my biggest problems with the message of "Prophecy": repeatedly, the creators of this film point out how important it is to restore and maintain the primacy of our ecological systems and then they throw in an anti-nature idea like feminism. I am certainly not against feminism as it pertains to an industrial system, but put those types of attitudes into an ecologically based form of civilization and it wouldn't last five minutes. Moreover, it doesn't help that Shire does a Shelley Duvall impression for most of the film, looking frail and weepy in nearly every scene.

Hysterical and histrionic, "Prophecy" still sports a few interesting moments, including the cheesy looking mutated bear and a scene where a kid in a sleeping bag rockets into a big rock at roughly a thousand miles per hour. The movie even has Armand Assante in the role of the Indian resistance leader. The DVD isn't anything to brag about since it doesn't even include a trailer, but the picture transfer looks good enough to keep the laughs coming fast and furious. "Prophecy" could have worked without the heavy-handed "save the forests" message because, as any true horror fan knows, a film can have a high body count and gallons of the red stuff without any lessons at all.

Rating:
Summary: a masterpiece of contemporary american cinema
Review: Mere words do not do this film justice. All I can say, however, is this: The scene with the boy in the sleeping bag has to be the most shocking scene in film since the shower scene in Psycho. Those feathers... those awful awful feathers....

Rating:
Summary: Actually quite a good movie.
Review: Okay so it's early Saturday morning, say about 3am. Your flipping through the channels and all that is on are those darn infomercials. Then you strike gold, a good old seventies horror flick. Yup, that about sums my life up, for excitement. In all seriousness, this movie is very good. Scary as hell and pretty grotesque for a PG rated movie. Yes the plot is kinda bleh, but who watches it for it's "save the environent" attempted message. Once you get by all that crap then your down to the "bear" necessities. This is your basic creature feature. Acting comes at a premium, and the characters pull some really idiotic stunts. One such stunt has our few remaining survivors stand, dumb-founded, watching rhe mutant teddy-bear cross the lake. Thinking that it may drowned. Duh??? I think that I would be running like hell. Oh well. The mutant teddy-bear is very cool, kinda cheezy at times, but overall does a good job at making ya jump. Hey, for the seventies the special effects are good. I can understand why the critics would pulverize this movie with negative remarks. Some may say it's cheap and it isn't worth the powder to blow it to hell with. I say otherwise, good for a scare and worth a rent or a latenight looky-see. I would probably stop short from buying it, however.

Rating:
Summary: Actually quite a good movie.
Review: Okay so it's early Saturday morning, say about 3am. Your flipping through the channels and all that is on are those darn infomercials. Then you strike gold, a good old seventies horror flick. Yup, that about sums my life up, for excitement. In all seriousness, this movie is very good. Scary as hell and pretty grotesque for a PG rated movie. Yes the plot is kinda bleh, but who watches it for it's "save the environent" attempted message. Once you get by all that crap then your down to the "bear" necessities. This is your basic creature feature. Acting comes at a premium, and the characters pull some really idiotic stunts. One such stunt has our few remaining survivors stand, dumb-founded, watching rhe mutant teddy-bear cross the lake. Thinking that it may drowned. Duh??? I think that I would be running like hell. Oh well. The mutant teddy-bear is very cool, kinda cheezy at times, but overall does a good job at making ya jump. Hey, for the seventies the special effects are good. I can understand why the critics would pulverize this movie with negative remarks. Some may say it's cheap and it isn't worth the powder to blow it to hell with. I say otherwise, good for a scare and worth a rent or a latenight looky-see. I would probably stop short from buying it, however.

Rating:
Summary: Earnestly awful
Review: Okay, so it means well. It's a cautionary tale--and I suppose it considers itself a "prophecy" about things to come--jammed right up your nose. I mean, when you're seeing five-foot-long salmon and two-foot-long tadpoles, you've got problems galore. In the case of this movie, it's chemicals and pollution. Okay, so we're got problems that we should fix. But I seriously doubt gooey mutant monsterbears are going to shamble around the woods and crunch people's heads off like lollipops. I was fortunate enough to see this movie on the big screen when it first came out. I still have a soft spot in my heart for it, even if they do have a French guy playing an American Indian.

Rating:
Summary: My stomach feels like the cover of this movie.....
Review: Out in the woods, the ogre of pollution rears its ghastly head. A lake filled with mercury. A bunch of dopes camping. And a big slimy bear with its skin turned inside-out. Now, that's the formula for horror. You get to see victims having their heads slapped off, and people getting mauled in sleeping bags. I was hoping that Jason Vorhees would show up and straighten things out, but, alas, he didn't. Neither did the Madman. Oh, well, better luck next time.....

Rating:
Summary: The beginning of Frankenheimer's downhill slide?
Review: Prophecy (John Frankenheimer, 1979)

Welcome to the world of ecohorror. Prophecy, John Frankenheimer's twentieth big-screen release, was the breakout moment for the new direction that would be taken by horror in the eighties (and still persists, to an extent, today). People were doing ecohorror on a small scale before this, but Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds, Black Sunday, etc.) and screenwriter David Seltzer (The Omen and its sequels, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) put together a blockbuster cast and a brilliant special effects team to bring the message to the masses. While they weren't wholly successful-the movie grossed about eighteen million during its theatrical run, ten million in rentals (admittedly, it was very hard to find before a recent DVD release) since-they did put together a pretty cool movie.

The Vernes, Robert (Robert Foxworth, presently a character in the TV series Six Feet Under) and Maggie (Talia Shire of Rocky fame), go to Maine, where Robert is going to do some research on the environmental effects of a logging company. The local Indian reservation is very unhappy with the company being there, and the company hopes that having some ecologists give the plant a stamp of approval will appease the increasingly restless natives. Rather than a stamp of approval, however, the Foxworths end up finding some very nasty effects that the company's waste has had on the surrounding wildlife...

When it comes right down to it, Prophecy is the first step in ecohorror; the plot structure and effects are straight out of fifties atomic horror movies. Everyone tries to figure out what's happening, someone points to atomic testing, and whoa!, look, big bugs! (or fill in your monster of choice). Which seems rather odd, actually, considering that Prophecy wasn't the first attempt at ecohorror, just the first attempt at doing it on a major scale. (For the first attempt, one has to go back to such other classic atomic horror ripoffs as Night of the Lepus. Which no one on earth should die without seeing.) Frankenheimer, so good earlier in his career at blazing new trails, was just doing what others had done before him and turning it from indie to blockbuster. Granted, someone needed to do it, but did it have to be the guy who made Seconds? As expected, as well, the effects take much of the place of plot and characterization (every major piece of characterization in the movie is there to advance the plot-or the message), but most of the actors do what they can with the cardboard roles they're given. Foxworth, Armand Assante, and the always amusing Richard Dysart all turn in decent performances. (Talia Shire reprises her role as Adrian. Surprise, surprise.) But the real treat here is the screen debut, uncredited, of Kevin Peter Hall, who later went on to play such makeup-heavy roles as the Predator (yes, THAT Predator), Harry (finish with "and the Hendersons"), and Gorvil (in the Tom Hanks made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters). When your role requires you to look menacing in about a hundred pounds of latex (supplied by Oscar-winning special effects guru Ellis Burman Jr., who made Michael J. Fox look all ages in the Back to the Future films), and you manage it despite looking like [censored so as not to be a spoiler], well, there you go.

Back in the day, on the big screen, it was a fun movie, especially if you were a pre-adolescent with a thing for monster movies. Twenty-odd years later, it's an amusing artifact of a more naïve time. But don't bother with this one unless you're on a nostalgia trip. ** 1/2

Rating:
Summary: A funny misfire of a movie.
Review: Prophecy certainly has a good idea to work with. Mercury poisoning from a paper mill's pulping process has created horrible mutations in the surrounding forest. Unfortunately director John Frankenheimer and screenwriter David Seltzer do not seem to have a clue about how to make this 'important' monster movie work properly. The monster is seen too clearly and too often, thus easily recognized as a man in a cumbersome suit, and Frankenheimer fails to build any real suspense, the attack scenes becoming more laughable than frightening as the film progresses. As a failure however the movie is quite entertaining, but it will most certainly scare younger children (as it did me during it's original theatrical run). Recommended to bad movie fans.

Rating:
Summary: Guilty pleasure
Review: Prophecy has always been something of a guilty pleasure for me. After all, the 'Native' American water rights issue and a toxic papermill controversy that underline the films story slap the viewer with Liberal righteousness. As such, the first half of the film is forced to crawl on its hands and knees to make sure everyone knows that this is a film with "socially relevant concerns". Aside from the films eco-tripe, you have Armand Assante playing an Injun. What's up with that? Talia Shire is weepy and tired throughout the whole thing. The second half of the film begins to provide the chill factor, as the mutated results of the rivers mercury contamination become obvious. Though she looks like a bear turned inside out, the mere concept of a giant mutated bear roaming the woods almost makes-up for the fims weakness's - and it's what brings me back to "Prophecy" again and again....

Rating:
Summary: Revenge of Nature
Review: Prophecy is another "revenge" of nature movie that show the effect of mercury poisoning on nature. Robert Foxworth is a dedicated doctor sent by the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, to investigate pollution in the woods of Maine from a lumber mill. This is causing friction between the mill and the native Indians. Foxworth finds that the wildlife is mutating (e.g., large tadpoles, freaky looking bear). Talia Shire (Adrian from the Rocky movies) plays Foxworth wife who is afraid that her unborn child may be "contaminated."