Prophecy

MOVIE #1,184 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 10.09.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! In honor of Indigenous Peoples' Day, I picked a horror movie starring a man of Italian and Irish descent in the lead Native American role. Last year on this day I watched Blood Quantum, which is a horror about indigenous people starring actually indigenous people. What I am trying to say is the overlap of genre films made by or about indigenous people is a fairly thin sliver on the venn diagram. This is the second John Frankenheimer joint I’ve reviewed after 52 Pick-Up, so I’m clearly good at at least two things: viewing lesser Frankenheimer movies and struggling to find horror movies about native populations.

This movie is… fine. The pacing is way off: too much wordy exposition in the first two acts leading into a mostly dull, aimless and surprisingly quiet third. There’s even this hilariously silent scene when a bunch of characters hide in a tunnel FOR OVER THREE MINUTES before one of them finally pokes their head out and is instantly killed (sped up to save you time)…


But the film is pretty well-acted (Talia Shire, best known as Adrian in the Rocky films, is the driving emotional center, and Armand Assante, despite not being a Native actor, brings a stoicism that is effective and respectful) and the creature design, while not very ‘good’ per say, is loveable. Described as an amalgamation of many creatures of the forest (but really just a giant bear turned inside out), the monster’s first appearance has him absolutely demolishing a little kid in a sleeping bag against a giant boulder…


And its little baby is sorta cute in a way…


Eventually, it devolves into a vaguely Gozilla esque man in a monster suit, but there’s a still a certain charm…


There is an environmental message at the core but they don’t lean into it that hard, and the film’s treatment of the native people definitely comes across as an afterthought when it’s all said and done.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
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Prophecy is a 1979 American science fiction monster horror-thriller film directed by John Frankenheimer and written by David Seltzer. It stars Robert Foxworth, Talia Shire and Armand Assante. Set along the Androscoggin or Ossipee River, the film follows an environmental agent and his wife filing a report on a paper mill in the river, not knowing that the paper mill's waste made a local bear mutate, causing the bear to run amok in the wilderness. It was released on June 15, 1979.