Prophecy * (1979, Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante) – Classic Movie Review 8521

‘She Lives. Don’t Move. Don’t Breathe. She Will Find You.’

Unfortunately, the green-horror crossover genre has never been particularly successful, and director John Frankenheimer’s 1979 killer bear monster movie Prophecy is no exception. Ecology and monster movies don’t really mix very well, though toxic wastes are always being blamed for the creation of movie monsters, from the 1954 Godzilla onwards. It is a convenient cliché to hang the movie on.

Thanks to the side effects of local industrial waste, with the toxic wastes poisoning the waters on a Maine countryside, a giant, bear-like animal terrorises a small logging town in New Hampshire.

Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire star as Dr Robert [Rob] Verne and his wife Maggie, who are going to have to do something about the giant killer bear monster (apparently female) pretty darned quickly.

The plot blunders on towards a dénouement involving magical Indian rituals, a sort of mystical cop-out with added pretentious profundity.

With a production and special effects that are very poor indeed, it is quite bad, but never quite so bad it is good. Frankenheimer, director of The Young Stranger, The Young Savages, The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Seconds, The Train, and Ronin, comes unstuck. But bad though Prophecy is, it is a whole lot better than Frankenheimer’s second monster movie, the 1996 remake of The Island of Dr Moreau.

Also in the cast are Armand Assante, Richard A Dysart, Victoria Racimo, Tom McFadden, George Clutesi, Burke Byrnes, Graham Jarvis, Everett L Creach, Charles H Gray as the Sheriff, Lyvingston Holmes, Evans Evans and Johnny Timko.

David Seltzer writes the screenplay.

It runs 102 minutes but ABC cut seven minutes for its 1983 American network TV premiere.

See also Grizzly (1976).

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8521

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