Prophecy (1979)

"Beware the Lumbering Monstrosity!"

The movie which Stephen King famously described as 

"A $12 000 000 movie that looks like it cost $1.98" gets an HD 1080p Blu-ray release from Eureka.

Public health doctor Rob (Robert Foxworth), sick of the futility of working in inner city slums, takes up a job with the Environmental Protection Agency looking into a land dispute between a logging company and the Native Americans who claim the forest the company has purchased belongs to them.

It's not long before he makes some peculiar observations - the natives are staggering around drunkenly and are complaining of diminished sensation, while animals are growing to way beyond their normal size. Could this last finding have anything to do with the recent spate of killings in the area?

Yes.

It's a bear.

Actually it's a mutant bear, and it got that way by eating mercury-poisoned fish which of course our hero and his pregnant wife (oh no!) have also been eating. Trapped after a storm renders their helicopter useless, Rob, his wife, and assembled interested parties have to survive the night and the bear and get back to civilisation before they're all killed by the lumbering monstrosity.

And lumbering monstrosity is a pretty good description of PROPHECY itself - a big budget, bottom of the barrel, daft as a brush eco-horror that takes ages to get going and then doesn't really do anything of interest when it does. None of the characters are especially engaging or likeable, with Foxworth one note beardy/shouty and Talia Shire as his wife moping around when she can't distract herself with her cello. The script is by THE OMEN's David Seltzer and Foxworth's explanation of human embryology is so silly it deserves a place in the Hall of Ridiculous Movie Science.

John Frankenhemer directed and it would seem his heart really wasn't in this one. The only scene where his skill shines is when the survivors are trapped underground, the beast lurking outside, but it's a long wait for a few moments of good film-making. Oh, and normally I'm all for a bombastic music score in a film like this but Leonard Rosenman's has to be the most over the top, over-orchestrated stuff a film like this has ever had accompany it. Just wait till that establishing shot of the paper mill. 

Eureka do give us some nice extras, including a good 20 minute piece with mime artist and writer-director of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI Tom McLoughlin who talks about working on the creature movements. There's also a new interview with David Seltzer plus two commentary tracks, one from Richard Harland Smith, and another by Lee Gambin and Emma Westwood. The first print run of 2000 copies comes with a booklet featuring new writing by Craig Ian Mann.

John Frankenheimer's PROPHECY is out on Blu-ray from Eureka on Monday 16th August 2021