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It
seems that somewhere deep in the forests
of upstate Maine, the Pitney Paper
Mill
has
been secretly polluting the water, poisoning the
local Indians and wreaking havoc on the
wildlife. As usual, the Natives pleas for
help are ignored until several Pitney
loggers disappear, and the search party
charged with finding them wind up dead -- mauled and mutilated
under some very bizarre circumstances. As
accusations and tensions rise between
these two factions, enter hot-shot EPA scientist Rob Vern (Robert
Foxworth) who,
along with his wife, Maggie
(Talia
Shire), has been sent in by the
government to arbitrate this dispute
before things become even more volatile.
While
Isley (Richard
Dysart), the mill's spokesman,
insists his employers run a clean
operation, he stonewalls Vern further by casting blame on the
Indians as a further attempt to stir up
trouble and prevent them from expanding
their logging operations. But everything
isn’t fine, far from it, and as the
evidence stacks up -- the fish are
abnormally huge, and the raccoons have
turned rabidly vicious -- Vern concludes
beyond a shadow of doubt that something insidious
is going on at the mill and the Indians
had nothing to do with it. And worst off
all, as a direct result, there's a 16-foot tall mutant creature
from hell running amok, and that's what
has been killing off all
the campers within a thirty-mile radius...
...Take
a little trip down memory lane with me, if
you will, back to when I was a younger brattling
circa 1979. One summer afternoon, I remember going to the shoe
store, and as the salesmen measured my foot,
and my mom chastised me for wearing a pair
of socks with holes in them, I heard the
most terrifying thing over the store’s
intercom, tuned into a local AM station:
There
was a heavy, preternaturally labored breathing
(or
may it was it heartbeat.) Then a voiceover warned
"not to move --
or even breathe, or she’d find
you!" followed by a scream, then an
ear splitting roar, more screams, and then!
silence...
This
was, of course, a radio-teaser (something
sorely lacking in film  promotion
these days) for
a new horror flick called Prophecy
-- and it was coming
soon to a theater near me! Turned out the
television ads were just
as terrifying. I recall a slow zoom on a
twitching, deformed thing that
wailed like a wounded baby, and a doomed camper jumping for his
life,
apparently stuck in a sleeping bag, being
chased by some horrible, roaring menace. I
seriously can't vouch for the accuracy of
any of this,
because I only saw very little while
peeking between my fingers. Later, I saw the
poster for the film at the local movie
theater. Featuring the same deformed
fetus, I was transfixed and could not get
that wailing mutant baby thing out
of my head. Eventually, the film came and
went, and thankfully, I never got a chance
to see it. (Alas, I was too young.)
Now,
jump
ahead a few years. And while searching over
the Video Kingdom's ever-shrinking selection
of Betamax titles (stop
laughing!), I saw the
wailing mutant baby thing again on the cover of a rental box.
Quickly snatching it up, memory synapses
firing, I headed home, popped it
in the VCR, uncoiled the wire for the
non-wireless remote (stop
laughing!), and
punched play. Needless to say, I was
filled with great expectations -- or at
least morbidly curious. And as the opening
sequence cued up, I steeled myself to be
scared [expletive deleted]-less.
Well,
it started out earnestly enough.
We
open in the woods, at night, with that
aforementioned search party. An ominous
gale blows through the forest around them,
the only sound we hear aside from the
panting bloodhounds. As the scenery slowly
bends and shifts in the breeze, eerily
distorting the limited pools of
illumination from their searchlights, the
three dogs pick up a scent and go charging
into the darkness. The soundtrack goes
berserk, and the man tethered to the dogs
can barely hold on as he's dragged along
behind them -- until they break into a
clearing and the two lead dogs plunge over
a cliff into a deep ravine! The other two
searchers manage to snag the dog-handler
before he's drug over the precipice, too,
and together, they start to reel the dogs
back in. Suddenly, the dogs whelp and the
line snaps. Not wanting to leave anybody
behind, the men gear up and repel down
into the blackened well to retrieve the
canines. But something goes wrong. They
scream and gurgle, and their lines snap,
too. Then the last man repels down to
help, too fast, stumbles, and plummets the
last few feet. When he hits bottom, he
sees the mangled remains of the
dog-handler, and has just enough time to
scream before he's drowned out by an
unearthly roar!
 Cool,
right? Yeah, but that's as good as it gets
-- during the opening credit sequence! The
film does sustain it for a little while
longer when the sun comes up and a serene
sonata soundtracks us through as we few
the carnage left by whatever attacked and
killed the men. After that, well, the film
pretty much drops trou and urinates all
over itself for the rest of the running
time.
The
insurgent Natives, led by John
and Ramona Hawks (Armand
Assante -- who
really looks like he could use some
Preparation H and Victoria Racimo),
believe that whatever it is lurking in the
forest doing all the damage is the Khatadin,
the vengeful spirit of the region, that has
manifested itself as a demon to seek
revenge on the polluters. And they're
proved right, sort of, when Vern
realizes that the paper mill has been
using mercury as part of its pulping
process. Investigating further, Vern
follows the lethal mercury's path of
destruction through the food chain, from
plant, to fish, to humans causing scores
of health problems; the most dastardly
being if some contaminated
food is consumed by a pregnant host. The
chemical mutates the fetus, genetically, resulting in
all the freakish wildlife they've
encountered. To make matters worse, Maggie
ate some of the
contaminated fish, too, and as she listens
in horror as her husband goes over the
textbooks and bleak reports, she's unable
to tell the overly self-righteous turd --
who adamantly refuses to bring a child
into this chaotic world -- that she,
herself, is pregnant! (Must have
been some mercury in the condom or
something.)
Ah,
but the locals aren't the only ones high
on the food chain consuming the
contaminated fish. And it isn't hard to
deduce that the Khatadin in all
probability is a mutated bear -- confirmed in
the next sequence when the monster attacks
and buzzsaws through another family of
campers. And as effective as the opening
sequence was, it is equaled by the sheer ineptitude
shown here when that horrible and roaring
menace turns out to be a giant rubber
gummy-bear that's been nuked in the
microwave for about five minutes. The
not-to-brief glimpses we get leave us
dumbfounded -- Is this what I was so scared
of all those years ago?, and then all credibility
is lost when that aforementioned camper,
hopping for his life, takes a right cross,
flies into a boulder, and detonates in an
explosive cloud of down-filling. And as
embarrassing as that attack sequence was, it
is surpassed in a later skirmish. And then
again. And then yet again at the climax!
When
word comes of the camper massacre, Vern
wants to investigate the campsite deep in
the forest. And while he, John and Ramona
gawk at the bloody damage and high
claw-marks on the trees, Maggie hears a
familiar wail coming from a nearby stream.
Trapped in a poacher's net, she finds two
hideously deformed bear cubs. One is dead,
but the other is still kicking and squealing.
This is the proof that Vern needs, but a
torrential storm grounds their helicopter,
preventing them from taking it back into
town. Needing shelter until the storm
passes, Ramona takes them them to the camp
of her grandfather, M'rai (George
Clutesi). Vern manages to stabilize
the cub, but fears it can't be moved or it
will die. He sends Hawks to bring back
Pitney, the sheriff and anyone from the
local newspaper. Confronted with the
evidence, Pitney does his best Mayor Vaughn
impression and doesn't exactly confess, but
he doesn't really deny it either. Of course,
by breaking the cardinal nature rule of coming
in between a mother bear and her cub, we
aren't all that surprised when the Khatadin
crashes into the camp and thins the cast out
a bit. And as we get more of a look at her,
and giggle as she clumsily trundles along,
we're dumbstruck as to why everyone helps
her out by running smack into her! *sigh*
Taking
refuge in some underground caves, with the
helicopter pilot injured during the attack,
and all the other vehicles destroyed, their
only option is to wait until sunrise and
then try to walk out to safety. This is
your plan? Come the dawn, after several
hours of trudging, they run into a piece of
luck at an abandoned logging camp. Commandeering
one of their trucks, strapping the poor
pilot to the roof!, the going still proves
slow, too slow as night falls again, making
them easy prey for the Khatadin --
who spent the day tracking down and eating
Pitney. The beast overturns the truck and
decapitates the poor pilot, bringing a spurt
of genuine sympathy from the audience
because he really had nothing to do with any
of this mounting stupidity. And with the
monster hot on their heels, what's left of
our group retreats to the Verns' cabin. But
that proves little shelter, leaving Vern to
battle the bear, mano-a-mano, in a final
showdown of rubber-suited mayhem that the
written word just cannot do justice to.
And
when the battle is won, and Vern and Maggie
head back to civilization, we're left to
wonder what is percolating in her womb, and
as a friendly reminder, we pan off their
plane, back down to the forests below, where
another mutant hell-beasts pops into a view.
You know, just in case we forgot.
The
End
Man,
I hate cheese-dick endings. What's a
cheese-dick ending, you ask? Well, that's my
own personal euphemism for cinematic
conclusions that usually involve a question
mark, or the revelation that the menace
really isn’t dead, or something has
surfaced to take the deceased monster/villain's
place. (See
illustration to the left.) And as a
whole, they smell bad, don't hold up for
very long, or survive any kind of weathering
scrutiny.
Again,
the film works pretty well at the beginning,
and has some genuinely scary moments when
all we hear is the monster prowling around
and attacking in the dark. Unfortunately, as
we see more and more of it as the film progresses
it becomes laughable -- but also a little
disappointing because until then the movie
was doing so well. Therein lies the main
problem I and a lot of other people have
with Prophecy,
when it falls into a familiar trap: if your
monster isn't very convincing, especially
when you have the kahonies to tab your film
as The Monster Movie, hide it as much
as possible or your film winds up silly,
instead of menacing, and the production is
doomed. (See
JAWS.)
Wasted
talent, that about sums it all up. In
front of the camera, poor Talia Shire
spends the whole movie as nothing more
than a sounding board/punching bag for
raging Robert Foxworth as he screeches
from one indignant screed to another.
Behind the camera, you’d
probably expect a lot more from director John
Frankenheimer and writer David Seltzer,
the men who brought us The Manchurian
Candidate and
The Omen
respectively. But as The
Film Fiend so beautifully put it in
his review:
Armed
with a message, a stick, and a dead
horse, Prophecy
teaches you that big corporations and
rich white people are inherently evil, a
truth you're bound to learn sooner or
later. In order to stuff this bitter
message into the collective throat of
the typical American movie-goer, the
environmental danger comes in the guise
of a hideously deformed mutant bear...Which
is fine, I suppose, though it does come
across more than a little preachy at
times. Yes, smoke-puffing paper plants
are very bad things. Yes, mutant animals
that randomly attack campers are
definitely no good. Stop hitting me
about the head and neck with your
message and get with the graphic
violence, okay? Thanks.
And
the film is pretty graphic in some scenes,
and I'm still a little baffled by it's PG
rating. When the audience soured to the
film and it tanked at the box-office, it
officially sounded the death-knell on the
big-budget horror revival of the late '70s
as well. As
I struggle for any good things that I
could possibly say about Prophecy,
all I could come up with is though it
isn't very scary, and is much too full of
itself, message wise, one thing it
definitely isn't, is boring and well worth
checking out -- just not for the reason
it's creators had intended. Not even
close.
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