This bummer is not to be confused with the 1995 Christopher Walken film of the same name. That film, after all, was a pretty good one, while this PROPHECY, a ludicrous ecologically-minded creature fest from 1979, is anything but.
The director, unbelievably enough, was the veteran John Frankenheimer, whose output includes classics like THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY and SECONDS. PROPHECY is not in the same league, but then Frankenheimer and horror were usually always a deadly combination, as evinced by this film and the notoriously awful 1996 ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. Nor did PROPHECY do much for Frankenheimer’s career, being an expensive bomb that led to a lean period, during which he made two low-budget productions for the notorious Cannon Group and the lame Don Johnson vehicle DEAD-BANG. He eventually clawed his way back up to (near) the top, but PROPHECY will always be around to remind us that even a filmmaker as iconic as John Frankenheimer is far from infallible.
It concerns Dr. Robert Verne, who with his wife Maggie travels to a remote forest in Maine to study the environmental impact of a printing press. Things get off to a rocky start when Robert’s driver enters into a chainsaw duel with a local Indian man, and continue in that vein as Robert discovers mutant fish, giant tadpoles and above-ground tree roots. Clearly something weird is afoot, and such suspicions are confirmed when Robert discovers that the printing plant is dumping gallons of Mercury into a lake.
The beginning of the end comes when Robert and Maggie find a mutant bear-creature in its infancy. What they don’t count on is the critter’s parent, a much bigger (and funnier-looking) bear thing lurking in the forest that’s not at all happy about Robert and Maggie’s intrusion…
An especially perceptive comment about this movie was made by Stephen King (in his 1981 nonfiction tome DANSE MACABRE), who pointed out that George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, released around the same time, was a low budget film that looked far more expensive than it actually was, while with PROPHECY the opposite is true.
It’s difficult to believe an experienced director like John Frankenheimer was behind this mess, as it’s as inept and cheap-looking as they come. The suspense sequences (such as the one in which the heroes are trapped in a sewage tunnel while the bear-creature roams overhead) are far from suspenseful, and the special effects hardly special—the “scary” monster at the film’s center is downright funny-looking.
The acting is of a piece with the direction, with skilled performers like Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire looking lost (Foxworth wears the same expression of awestruck terror throughout), and Armand Assante making for the least convincing “Native American” in memory. And the hectoring ecologically-minded screenplay, by THE OMEN’S David Seltzer, is plain rotten. Bringing up environmental issues back in the seventies, long before they became chic, was laudable, but doing so in the form of a goofy-looking mutant bear is inadvisable to say the least.
Vital Statistics
PROPHECY
Paramount Pictures
Director: John Frankenheimer
Producer: Robert L. Rosen
Screenplay: David Seltzer
Cinematography: Harry Stradling, Jr.
Editing: Tom Rolf
Cast: Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante, Richard Dysart, Victoria Racimo, George Clutesi, Burke Byrnes, Mia Bendixsen, Tom McFadden, Graham Jarvis