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Prophecy, 1979. Directed by John Frankenheimer.
Robert Foxworth, Talia Shire.
Whenever A-list talent winds up working on B-list material, the collision sometimes provides the audience with a spectacular wreck of a movie. Prophecy is just such a spectacle. This is gussied up with name stars and a name director and is very careful to conceal its essential cheesiness, but when the awful truth of it rears its ugly head--look out! Robert Foxworth plays a concerned scientist investigating an environmental dispute with wife Talia Shire in the Maine woods where the local Indians are battling Big Business over the pollution they are dumping into the environment. There are these mutant bear rampaging through the countryside as a result of the toxins. The bears, which are the money shots here, are some of the worst monster suits of the seventies (rivaling even The Octa-Man in terms of credibility) and most of the other elements here are equally ridiculous--my favorite gaffe is the teepees the Indians live in (in 1979, in the Maine woods, in a Native American tradition which never built the things), but the salmon the size of dolphins are a close second, and the exploding sleeping bag scene is some kind of marvel. There are some good things in this movie, including some disturbing mutant animal babies (which are pretty good special effects) and a superb opening scene which demonstrates the wisdom of keeping the monster offscreen. This scene is followed by a lovely montage between the wreckage of the first scene's victims disolving into Talia Shire's concert hall performance. But the good things only serve to force the bad things into even starker contrast. This is a situation exacerbated by the film's unfortunate case of "significance." This is a catalogue of seventies-era, Hollywood-style liberal guilt and touches on every "cause" one can imagine (save, perhaps, the anti-nuclear card that was played out at the same time in The China Syndrome). At its core, Prophecy is the same kind of eco-horror movie that Roger Corman's New World Pictures specialized in--and at times, it even resembles their cheapness--but unlike those films, it's remarkably earnest. Corman's films--Piranha for instance--puncture their own self-importances with an awareness of their own opportunism and a knowing self-deprication that makes them palatable even three decades after the fact. This film, on the other hand, is painfully strident and painfully dated. This may be where the clear demarcation between the John Frankenheimer of Seconds and The Manchurian Candidate and the Frankenheimer of Reindeer Games and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Great directors rarely provide such clear instances of jumping the shark, but here it is. This is a career-wrecking body blow. This makes a good second feature for Alien (which came out about a week later), and the double bill should be used as an abject lesson in how to make a blockbuster from material taken from the genre shitheap, and more importantly, how not to go about it. |