That run of 1970s ecological horror films set in motion by the likes of Frogs (1972) and turned into box office gold by Jaws (1975) was still rumbling on at the end of the decade and was, if anything, becoming more absurd with each successive film. Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) was smart enough not to take itself too seriously but John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy is so resolutely po-faced that, after an intriguing start, collapses under the weight of its own self-importance.
In the backwoods of Maine (the film was actually shot in British Columbia, Canada, one of the earliest films made by a major Hollywood studio in the province, a practice that later became commonplace leading to the province’s largest city, Vancouver, being dubbed Hollywood North) a search-and-rescue team has gone missing while searching for some lost lumberjacks. Environment Protection Agency doctor Robert Verne (Robert Foxworth) and his pregnant wife Maggie (Talia Shire) are sent to investigate and find themselves caught up in a dispute between the local Native Americans, headed by John Hawks (Armand Assante) and a local lumber mill run by Bethel Isely (Richard Dysart). The latter blames the “Opies” (short for “original people”) for the fate of the missing lumberjacks while the locals believe it to be the work of Katahdin, a forest spirit that has been disturbed by the logging operations. Verne’s investigations uncovers genetic mutations among the local wildlife and comes to realise that the mill has been illegally depositing large quantities of mercury in the nearby river. His fears are confirmed when “Katahdin”, actually a huge, mutated bear, starts to lay waste to the countryside.
The preachy, finger-wagging screenplay was the work of David Seltzer who was still riding high on the success of The Omen (1976). But where that had been a straight-ahead horror films with few pretensions, Prophecy begs its audience to take it seriously despite the ridiculous mutant bear that wanders in from time to time determined to prick the film’s aching pomposity. Seltzer and Frankenheimer do their serious message no favours by stirring in chainsaw duels, angry raccoons and a ludicrous overgrown tadpole, all of which are met with stony-faced earnestness by a cast who deserve credit for at least appearing to take this nonsense seriously.
Social issues are unconvincingly crow-barred in as if all involved were deeply embarrassed to be making a “mere” monster movie and needed to be doing something more “worthy” with their time. Make no mistake, the message that Prophecy is trying to impart is laudable – essential even, more so now than ever – but as is all to depressingly the case it’s laid on with a trowel, the plot constantly being halted so someone can make a little speech. It’s almost as it Frankenheimer and Seltzer didn’t trust their audience to work things out for themselves.
Frankenheimer reportedly shot several far gorier scenes that he subsequently removed before the film was released, again perhaps suggesting that he felt awkward about dabbling in horror. He also supposedly ordered the original concept for the monster to be changed to the silly bear thing that we ended up with. Whatever his other talents may have been, and he certainly made some very fine films, he seems to have had not the faintest idea about making a horror film. In John Frankenheimer: A Conversation with Charles Champlin, edited by Lisa Mitchell, Karl Thiede and Champlin, Frankenheimer blamed the shoddiness of Prophecy on his alcoholism – which may well be true but a lack of affinity for the genre certainly didn’t help much.
Seltzer seems to have based his screenplay on the real life mercury poisoning of a river near the Japanese city of Minimata that had catastrophic effects on the locals and while one doesn’t doubt the writer’s righteous indignation at such ecological and social irresponsibility, his script is too shrill and sensationalist to do it justice. Instead it trivialises several important issues and in the end it’s just another monster film, albeit a slickly made one, but one constantly at odds with the seriousness that Seltzer tries to bring to the proceedings. Its ecological concerns feel both half-hearted and heavy-handed – the proselytising disappears from time to time to let the laughable mutant bear have its moment in the sun and then gets dragged back front and centre in leaden speeches and passionate outbursts that are no more convincing than the man in the rubber monster suit.
Foxworth is a bland hero, Shire gets little to do but scream and ask questions (the issue of her character’s pregnancy is important for a while, then forgotten about until Seltzer needs it again for a bit of business near the end) and Armand Assante, an actor of Irish-Italian descent, makes for an unconvincing Native American. They do their best but even Foxworth, Shire and Dysart can’t muster much enthusiasm for a tortuously lengthy scene where they tour a noisy paper mill. One suspects that production got access to a real mill and were determined to get their money’s worth from it. Which is probably all deeply fascinating if the need to delve into the day to day workings of a paper mill has been gnawing at you for a while but everyone else it’s just another dull detour keeping us from seeing what we all turned up – the monster.
And plenty of people certainly showed up back in 1979, the film turning a tidy profit for producers Paramount Pictures. Of course what all those people actually thought of the film is lost in time – there may have been $22 million worth of box office receipts (against a $12 million budget) but that could have amounted to $20 million+ punters who were bored to tears by it all. The critics have never been kind to it (which means nothing really) but Prophecy now has a small but passionate cult following for reasons that are next to impossible to fathom.
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