Joseph Stefano, screenwriter of Psycho and producer of much of The Outer Limits, had a rule for most of his tenure on the latter: every episode had to have a ‘bear’ – i.e., a big scary creature, which would preferably show up just before the mid-episode ad break (round about the same time as the first Hulk-out in an episode of The Incredible Hulk). I suppose it’s sound enough as a principle, though it sounds quite creatively limiting to me.
The whole issue of ‘when you show the bear’ is fairly important when you’re doing a monster movie, and the consensus seems to be ‘not too early, not too late’ – too early, and you run the risk of running out of things to do with it, not to mention you have less time to build suspense; too late, and the audience will get bored. (Although Hal Chester, who was involved in the making of Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Night of the Demon, ensured that the monster got wheeled on very early in both of those, albeit only for a sort of appetising cameo.) Just after the mid-point seems to be the sweet spot, structurally speaking, though of course this isn’t necessarily a good thing if your monster is no good. I think it was Jeff Morrow, star of The Giant Claw, who observed that acting in a monster movie is a bit like going on a blind date: you’re relying on the special effects department to come up with a co-star that isn’t going to make you look stupid.
The movies and TV we’ve been discussing so far all date back to the 1950s and early-to-mid 60s, but some truths are eternal, as the makers of Prophecy discovered in 1979. This was the year that the big studios all bet heavily on horror and monster movies – it was the year of Alien, Nightwing, John Badham’s Dracula, and The Amityville Horror, to name but a few of the more prominent releases, and Prophecy was amongst them. (If you ask me, the most successful films from that year came from elsewhere – let’s not forget this was also the year of Herzog’s Dracula, and the one in which Dawn of the Dead got its American release.)
Everyone’s heard of Alien and Dracula, and some of the other names are vaguely familiar, but Prophecy (like Nightwing) seems to have vanished into movie obscurity, mentioned only as a joke or as a camp cult movie. I don’t recall ever coming across it on British TV – in fact, I’m not sure I’d ever heard of it until I read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, in which he writes affectionately about it at some length. Looking at that book again recently, it seemed to me that there was an obvious gap in my knowledge of cinema – and all sorts of old movies are now available on t’interweb if you know where to look.
Prophecy is directed by John Frankenheimer, who also did The Manchurian Candidate, and is clearly not a low-budget movie. We open off in a forest somewhere (we later learn this is Maine) where some search-and-rescue types are being dragged along by their dogs. Something has got the dogs so riled up they run literally off the edge of a cliff, and have to be lowered down into the ravine below. When the actual search-and-rescue guys go down into the ravine as well, there is some roaring, some screaming and then an ominous silence. Here the film shows the first sign of wanting to be more than just schlock: arty shots of the corpses of the search team strewn around, or in one case still hanging from their harness, are accompanied by light classical music, in a slightly obvious but still decent attempt at juxtaposition.
The light classical music turns out to be coming from an orchestra which includes Maggie (Talia Shire), a nice lady who lives in Washington DC. Her main problem is that she would like to have a baby – and indeed is in the early stages of having a baby – but her husband is oblivious to this, and opposed to overpopulating the planet any further. He is Dr Rob Verne (Robert Foxworth, with hair and beard that make him look like Christ after a perm and some highlights). Verne is the epitome of the scientist as envoy of Apollo – Foxworth is doing principled stoicism non-stop for most of the movie – driven to despair by the awful living conditions of so many in the city. Someone offers him a change of scene and a job which may end up making an actual difference – the Environmental Protection Agency has been called in to mediate in a dispute between a paper mill and the local Native Americans up in Maine. Go for two weeks! Make a holiday of it! Take the wife!
So they go, collected by the representative of the paper company (Richard Dysart), who is initially very agreeable. Here we get the film’s first major misstep – an unforgivably laborious bit of exposition where someone starts talking about something called Katahdin, the legendary supernatural protector of the forest (according to the Indians anyway), not long after Dysart has let Verne know that people have started disappearing in the woods. We also meet the fiercely proud leader of the Indians (played by Armand Assante, who is every bit as Native American as his name suggests), and there is a symbolic axe-vs-chainsaw fight between the paper mill people and the locals, who are blocking access to the forest.
Soon enough Dr Rob is discovering signs that not all is well in the forest – the locals are acting like they’re drunk even when they’re not, showing reduced sensitivity to pain, and there is some freakishly big wildlife too – fish the size of canoes and a tadpole the size of a small dog. An argument with his wife about having a child gets interrupted when he is attacked by a demented raccoon. It takes a committed performance to sell a savage raccoon attack to the audience, and Foxworth… well, maybe he was saving himself for the climax of the movie.
Anyway, the signs are clear – the paper company, who are on the payroll of the more Dionysian branch of science, have been dumping mercury in the water, causing genetic damage throughout the local ecology. As Maggie and Rob have just enjoyed a fish supper from the local lake, there is a real possibility they may not just be taking their work home with them, but keeping it in the family for generations to come. The discovery of squawking, deformed creatures like half-melted bear cubs is an unpleasant indication of what may be to come (Stephen King found the mutant cubs more effective and unsettling than I did).
Well, Dr Rob calls in the authorities, thinking that the mutant cubs are pretty good evidence of environmental wrongdoing, but in the middle of a dramatic confrontation between all the concerned parties, the cubs’ mother (or father) turns up, looking just as messed up as they do. Dr Rob, Maggie, and some sympathetic Native Americans are faced with the problem of how to get back to civilisation before Katahdin the half-melted mutant bear catches up with them and mauls them to death…
So when do they decide to (literally) show the bear in Prophecy? At about the usual point, halfway through – some townie campers are set upon in the woods and quickly despatched. An alternative answer would be ‘much too soon’, however. Most of Prophecy is a B-movie creature feature, an update from the 1950s with the atom age paranoia sifted out and some environmentalist concerns mixed in – this sort of thing is seldom great art, even with someone like Jack Arnold in charge, but it can be effective enough in its slightly naive way. The thing that destroys the movie, totally and utterly, is the monster, which is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever seen put on screen. Every scene with the creature is reduced to unintentional farce by the sheer low quality of the monster suit and the desperate tricks Frankenheimer is obliged to use to try and hide this fact. It’s hilarious. The fact that everyone else is still trying hard to sell the beastie as a terrifying menace just makes it funnier and funnier. (Talia Shire, then having a career spike off the back of Rocky – she is top-billed here – must have felt she was reliving her American-International Pictures apprenticeship, when she appeared in films like The Dunwich Horror.)
Set against how bad most of the special effects are, most of the other problems with Prophecy – the slightly corny presentation of the Native Americans, the weak climax, the fact that there’s a reproductive rights angle to the story which never seems to get fully developed – melt away. Unfortunately, those elements of the film which show promise also vanish like mist when the sun comes out. It’s an interesting companion piece to Nightwing, even sharing a cast member (George Clutesi plays a semi-unhinged Indian elder in both). Prophecy is a worse film, but also more entertaining, too – Nightwing‘s just stuck in a middleground of being stolid, with some duff effects, while Prophecy shows real signs of being genuinely nuts, terrible effects or not.
I can see why Prophecy has become a sort of cult favourite, for the same reasons it has vanished into obscurity. It’s really, even by 1979 standards, a very old fashioned monster movie, driven along by that brand of technophobia which closely resembles the nature-in-revolt horror film. There are plenty of monster movies these days which are just as bad, but there’s often a knowingness to them. Prophecy is never less than very serious-minded and earnest. You have to admire it for that even as it makes the film even more ridiculous. Hardly even a Good Bad Movie, but nevertheless oddly cherishable in its way.