Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: John Frankenheimer
Starring: Robert Foxworth, Talia Shire, Armand Assante, Richard
Dysart, George Clutesi
The latter half of the 1970s gave rise to a wave of environmentally themed
horrors, a way for Hollywood to cash in on the success of
Jaws while indulging their liberal leanings. A small subset of
these films -
Arthur Hiller's Nightwing, George McCowan's Shadow of the Hawk, and best of all, William Girdler's bonkers The Manitou -
played out against a Native American backdrop. Another such movie is
John Frankenheimer's 1979 eco-horror Prophecy. It's a sign of how seriously Hollywood was taking these issues that the
project could attract a director as respectable as Frankenheimer, with a
budget higher than that of Star Wars was sunk into the
project.
In the woods of Maine, employees of a logging outfit have been brutally
slaughtered by an unknown assailant. The loggers blame the local Native
tribe, whose forest habitat they've been gradually eroding. The Natives
blame 'Katahdin', a mythical Sasquatch type creature said to be "larger than
a dragon with the eyes of a cat."
For some reason I never could figure out, the Environmental Protection
Agency hauls a random doctor, Robert Verne (Robert Foxworth), off the
streets of Washington DC, believing only he can objectively assess the
situation. Don't ask me what qualifies him for this particular job; you just
have to go with it.
Arriving in Maine with his pregnant wife Maggie (Talia Shire), Verne
sees first hand the animosity between the loggers and the Natives (led by
Armand Assante in a classic piece of "he's tanned enough" casting).
He also discovers the effects of pollution from the local mill, which is
dumping mercury into the river, causing animals to hideously mutate. One
such animal is a giant bear that has been ripping the heads off lumberjacks
and massacring camping families.
It's a curious coincidence that Eureka's blu-ray of
Prophecy arrives the same week as the new Johnny Depp vehicle
Minamata
hits cinemas. Both movies deal with essentially the same subject - in
reality, the people of the Japanese town of Minamata suffered mercury
poisoning at the hands of their local chemical company, just like the
Natives of Frankenheimer's fiction. It's a sign of how little has changed in
four decades that both movies centre a white man as their hero.
I use "hero" loosely as Foxworth's Verne is one of the most unlikeable
leads of '70s horror cinema. He's a condescending liberal jerk who thinks of
himself as progressive yet is as willing to screw over the Native American
population for the sake of the environment as the local mill is for the sake
of profit. David Seltzer's script offers an early critique of how
neo-liberals weaponise identity politics to turn working class communities
against one another when Verne tries to guilt-trip the Natives by comparing
their sprawling forest home to the Washington tenements that house 11
African-Americans to a room.
Prophecy isn't exactly subtle about its political message. At
one point the clash between tradition and progress is illustrated when a
chainsaw-wielding lumberjack takes on an axe-wielding Native in a one-sided
duel. The movie often slows down so one character or another can deliver a
lecture on environmentalism (it's not quite Steven Seagal at the end of
On Deadly Ground, but it's not far off).
For all of its progressive intentions, Prophecy is ultimately
a monster movie, and a pretty hackneyed one at that. With his scripts for
Piranha and Alligator, John Sayles showed how you can deliver an environmental message in a
monster movie without causing any friction or slowing down the plot. It's a
feat Seltzer and Frankenheimer can't pull off here, and in the bloody climax
it feels like the pair have given up on trying to educate the unwashed in
the audience and decide to finally deliver the carnage they've been waiting
for.
And what carnage! When the mutant bear (played by Kevin Peter Hall,
who would later don the Predator outfit) goes on the rampage the movie
really delivers on shock moments. There's a scene involving a young boy in a
sleeping bag that will have you rewinding to check if you really did just
see what you thought you saw (and you did!). The bear looks frankly
ridiculous, covered in grotesque warts that make it look like a giant
STD-infected penis. It's probably just as well that the creature effects are
so laughable, as seeing well-rendered mutated animals is tough to take, as
anyone who has seen that dog in The Fly 2 can attest.
New feature length audio commentary by Richard Harland Smith; a new feature
length audio commentary by film writers Lee Gambin and Emma Westwood; new
interviews with screenwriter David Seltzer and mime artist Tom McLoughlin;
original trailer.
