Cult Movie Review: Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

Historically-speaking, I have not been the biggest fan of the Paranormal Activity franchise. 

I disliked the first film for its lack of subtlety and nuance.  Paranormal Activity’s (2007) final reveal of a demonic close-up was a capitulation to lowest common denominator-style filmmaking, and an undercutting of the very “found footage” paradigm the film exploited.

I warmed a little (just a little…) to the second entry.  Some moments in the drama worked moderately well, whereas some effects -- exposed in too-revealing long shot -- actually played as funny.

I was surprised and impressed with the third film in the franchise, however, which I found, by-and-large, scary.   There’s a highly-effective sequence in Paranormal Activity 3 wherein a man (with video-camera) and a young girl seek shelter in a bathroom as an angry spirit attempts to break in. The scene escalates and escalates, and is as impressive as any “big” horror movie moment produced in the last few years.

So color me ambivalent about the franchise as whole.

But recently I had a reader here on the blog help me contextualize the PA movies in terms of horror movie history.  When I reviewed the found-footage genre for high-points in a recent Ask JKM post, Trent wrote the following in a comment:

“I still think that you have to recommend 'Paranormal Activity' as a top tier found footage film. If ‘The Blair Witch Project'is to the found-footage craze of the 2000's as 'Halloween' was to the slasher film craze of 1980s, (which I think is fair) then 'Paranormal Activity' is analogous to 'Friday the 13^th.”

I suspect Trent’s point is spot-on regarding the comparison (if not the quality of Paranormal Activity).  Halloween and The Blair Witch Projectare the gold standards of their respective genre formats, and demonstrate a zenith in terms of artistry and effect. The Friday the 13^thfilms and The Paranormal Activity movies are much more mainstream and commercially calculated. 

Likewise, these series share in common the fact that they seem to vacillate wildly in terms of quality from entry to entry.  Furthermore, the next chapter seems to come out every year, without fail.

To continue the comparison, Paranormal Activity 3 may be the Friday the 13^th (1980), or Friday the 13^th Part II (1981) of the PA saga… a relatively “good” or strong outing.

But unfortunately, this comparison also means that the recent Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) is the Jason Takes Manhattan of the PA franchise, meaning, simply, that it is pretty dreadful.

In fact, Paranormal Activity 4 is so bad that it reinforces many of the common misperceptions about the found footage format: that the acting is bad; that the films are dull and pointless; and that the movies don’t make a lot of sense from a narrative or thematic standpoint.

 Paranormal Activity 4continues the story of the demonically-possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) and the nephew she stole from his crib, Hunter.  The story is set in 2011 as Katie and a child named Robbie (Brady Allen) move into the house across the street from a tech-savvy teenager named Alex (Kathryn Newton).  Almost immediately, Alex and her buddy Ben (Matt Shively) suspect something weird is going on, and grow alarmed as Robbie befriends Alex’s little brother, Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp).

When Robbie comes to stay in Alex’s house for a few weeks (while his mom is ostensibly in the hospital), weird disturbances occur at night, and Alex begins to suspect that someone or something wants her dead.  With Ben’s help, she sets up cameras all over the house, and monitors the footage, at least for a time, from her computer.

The first thing one might notice about Paranormal Activity 4 is that this is the only franchise entry not to focus on adults, but teenagers instead.  Unlike the Friday the 13^th films, however, the characters who are supposed to be teenagers are actually played by teenagers, rather than by twenty-somethings.  And for all the film’s abundant flaws, the actress who plays Alex, Kathryn Newton is pretty strong.  At the very least, she’s better than the material she is asked to carry. 

But the important point is an underlying one. The franchise’s shift to teenage concerns suggests recognition on the part of the producers that the franchise is now aging. Therefore attracting certain demographic groups has become crucial.

Secondly, this is the first Paranormal Activity film that is girded with specific tributes or homages to the horror genre, which again suggests that the franchise’s appeal is narrowing, and that filmmakers are hoping to target some demographics more directly.

I don’t know how many general audiences will recognize the re-staging of a famous and scary sequence from Peter Medak’s The Changeling (1980), or another moment that echoes Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), for example.  There’s even a moment here that deliberately recalls Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). I recognized these allusions, but they don’t add up to anything meaningful in terms of Paranormal Activity 4’s narrative or themes.

My biggest concern with the film is that it features almost no scares.  Even the jump scares are mild.  And because this film is longer in duration (nearly 100 minutes) than the other Paranormal Activity films, the almost total absence of frightening material is noteworthy and troublesome.  This film is a long, hard slog -- Paranormal Inactivity -- and with the possible exception of a visual gimmick regarding Kinect, there are precious few innovations in format.

In addition, Paranormal Activity 4’s finale violates a cardinal rule of the found footage sub-genre: we don’t know what kind of device Alex is recording on during her fateful, night-vision journey into the neighbor’s dark and sinister house.  She doesn’t seem to be using her laptop, and there’s little indication she picked up Ben’s video camera.  Instead, the entire final scene plays like a coda tacked on in post-production, after audience focus groups found the third act uninspiring or disappointing.  One minute, Alexa is in her own house, being attacked by an invisible demon, and in the next, she’s crossing the street, using an unknown device, and probing into the dark house alone.  Almost all the supernatural “action” of the film, at least in terms of effects, occurs in this brief denouement.

Further, Paranormal Activity 4 falls prey to a problem that has become increasingly common in the found-footage genre.  Specifically, cameras record overt, undeniable, dangerous supernatural activity, but the dramatis personae mysteriously don’t review that important footage.  Here, Alex is levitated above her bed one night.  Several days later, she still hasn’t reviewed the footage and witnessed what occurred.

If she did watch that footage, it would be evidence for her doubting Thomas parents, of course.  And yes, there’s a lame excuse in the movie that Alex can’t access the footage because she’s forgotten the password that enables viewing.  But if you really believed a malevolent entity was after you, would you wait days and days before attempting even a basic password recovery?  Most password encoded programs have a prompt that reads: forgot password? Click here. 

Secondly, Ben also has access to the footage.  That footage includes his hot, would-be girlfriend going to bed every night in her skimpy jammies and shorts.  So wouldn’t he at least check in for lascivious purposes?

Basically, the entire last act of Paranormal Activity 4 is predicated on the ridiculous notion that Alex is filming tons of footage (so we in the audience can see it), but not watching a lick of it (so she can remain in danger).  It’s contrived in the extreme. 

Of all the Paranormal Activity movies, I would count this one as the worst, and also the most disappointing given the surprising quality of the third film.  There’s not even one good scare moment in this sequel, or one legitimately great visual composition, or scene set up. It’s all a slow, meandering trip to nowhere, with a tacked-on ending that exists only to grease the wheels for the inevitable sequel next year.

Perhaps that no-doubt-upcoming effort will be more Jason Lives! or The Final Chapter than a A New Beginning.  One can hope.

Cult-Movie Review: The Possession (2012)

The Possession(2012), from producer Sam Raimi and Nightwatch director Ole Bornedal utilizes a “true story” scenario as the basis for its horrifying tale of demonic possession.  In particular, the story of a diabolical “dibbuk” (demon) box came to light some years ago when the owner of the box attempted to sell it on E-Bay, apparently fearing for his safety and life. 

The dibbuk box (or wine cabinet, actually…) has since been the subject of TV specials and a book, and the tale certainly makes for some good copy in relation to The Possession.  As I’ve written before, the old horror gimmick of intimating that a story is true increases considerably a production’s sense of immediacy and urgency.

What interests me most about this “true” story is the manner in which we allow items such as the “cursed” dibbuk box gain traction or power over our imaginations.  While I was writing this review, for instance, the computer cord to my wife’s computer, half-way across the office, fell suddenly from her desk and hit the wood floor.  And when I looked back at my computer keyboard, five ants were crawling on it...something that has never happened to me in my life.  Then just now, as I proofread this review, my laptop’s screen went black for a moment for no apparent reason.

Did these strange events occur because I was daring to write a review of The Possession?  Or did they occur because my cat Lila, unseen by me but present in the room, knocked down the wire?  Because I had finished eating my lunch a few minutes earlier and left some crumbs near the keyboard?  Because I’m writing on Microsoft software and hell, it’s always glitchy?

My only point here is that once you become convinced that something sinister boasts an influence over you and the events around you, it’s really easy to gaze at all succeeding facts as evidence of that theory.  Is the dibbuk box actually cursed with some kind of ancient malevolent power?  Or do we create the negative vibe from our own fearful imaginations and blame the box?

I only wish The Possession would have tread more deeply into this idea instead of going for a kind of boiler-plate demonic possession narrative and structure.  The movie would have been a lot scarier, actually, had it attempted some level of ambiguity about what was really to blame for the dark events in the lives of the central characters.

But because The Possession is so straight-forward, horror lovers may be disappointed with the film.  It is relatively tame in terms of action and violence, so much so that is rated PG-13, not R.  And if one is familiar at all with the general outline of demon possession films, The Possession follows that pattern with relatively little variation, surprise, or ingenuity.

That structure goes something like this. A nice family is shocked and horrified when a child begins acting strangely. The behavior worsens, and science can’t help, so religious authority is brought in to exorcise the demon inside.  The exorcism succeeds one way or another (by vanquishing the demon and/or directing the demon to another body), and then the young person is restored, and the family healed too.

Certainly, that’s the pattern of The Exorcist, and just because The Possession involves Hebrew spirits and religious material, that doesn’t differentiate the material to a substantial or meaningful degree.  Therefore, The Possession is relatively safe in terms of the scares it presents, and since the horror genre is about pushing decorum and boundaries, that’s a problem. 

The Possessionstars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Clyde, a man who has recently divorced, but who doesn’t want to be divorced.  His wife Stephanie (Kyra Sedgewick) has left him in favor of a smarmy dentist, Brett, played as if a closet sociopath by Grant Show.  Clyde moves into his lonely new house, and sees his two daughters, Emily (Natasha Calis) and Hannah (Madison Davenport) only on the weekends.

One weekend, Clyde and the girls visit a yard sale, and Emily buys the aforementioned dibbuk box.  After the strange box is opened and strange relics -- including a human tooth, a ring and a moth -- are found inside, Emily begins to act strangely.  She reports at one point that she doesn’t even feel like herself anymore. 

At first, Clyde and Stephanie blame their divorce for Emily’s increasingly anti-social behavior.  But before long, Clyde is certain that the strange Hebrew box has released a demon, one that is possessing his youngest daughter.  Clyde enlists the help of a Jewish rabbi’s son, Tzadok (Matisyahu) to expel the demon.

When he can’t do so immediately, Clyde invites the demon to take him and release Emily…

The Possessionstrikes upon a workable metaphor or sub-text involving the family and demonic possession, and in some sense, that’s the most intriguing aspect of this horror film.  In particular, The Possession really concerns divorce, and the impact of divorce upon young children. 

Emily is deeply depressed by her parents’ separation, and though her violent, anti-social behavior is ultimately attributed to the exorcism, it could clearly be attributed to her unsettled family life as well.  At one point, her high-school principal comments on how Emily no longer finds joy in learning, and has grown distant from her friends.  That doesn’t sound like demonic possession so much as it does depression.  

Viewed in this light, The Possession is about a splintered family that learns to act as a unit again, and save one of their own from darkness.

The problem, of course, is that this metaphor clearly has no merit in terms of the film’s presentation.  The audience has no doubts about Emily’s problem, given the ridiculous prologue, which features the dibbux box pounding and abusing an old woman. 

The relative predictability of the character responses, especially the obligatory disbelief of the mother, who would rather believe that her husband is beating her daughter than countenance the prospect of something supernatural, also poses a problem in terms of predictability.  Even the film’s final sting in the tail/tale -- which allows room for the dibbuk box to return and haunt another family in the inevitable sequel -- seems familiar to horror movies from here to eternity. It’s all just a bit pro-forma, or pre-packaged.

The scariest scene in The Possession is not the exorcism itself, which fails to improve on the gold standard, dramatized in Friedkin’s 1973 film, but rather an apparently routine visit to the hospital.  While Emily undergoes an MRI scan, Stephanie and Hannah see visual evidence of the demon lodged inside her, living in her chest.  There’s actually a demonic creature hiding in there, and it looks absolutely terrifying. 

The scene is so effective because we all, perhaps secretly, long for science to provide us concrete proof of things that go bump in the night.  Here, even science backs up the tale of demonic possession.  Of course, there’s no narrative follow-up.  The MRI pictures aren’t presented to the world to prove the existence of demons.

For every mildly effective moment like the MRI scan sequence, The Possession features several that don’t work.  For instance, at one point Brett is struck with the dibbuk box curse.  His mouth begins to bleed and his teeth suddenly fall out.  He staggers to his car and drives away, conveniently never to be seen again. 

What happened to him? Where did he go?  What does he believe now? The film doesn’t even feature a throwaway line indicating that “Brett is gone, and not coming back.”   In other words, he’s a convenient foil for Clyde early in the story, when the patriarch is separated from his family and forced to endure Brett’s presence at the head of his dinner table.  But once the family is back together, Brett is just a superfluous loose end, not to be seen or heard from again.

Also, Tzadok reveals in the third act the method by which to make the dibbuk leave Emily and return to the box.  Its name must be spoken aloud.  Yet during the actual exorcism, Tzadok fails to speak that name for a terribly long time, thus allowing the possessed Em to escape custody, and setting up a jump-scare scene of Clyde wandering in the dark, in search of her (in a morgue, of all places).

Given the real-life particulars of the dibbuk box, the story in The Possession just isn’t terribly interesting, stimulating, or surprising.  The film is well-made, well-acted and well-scored, but also almost completely lacking in scares and invention.   In the final analysis, The Possession just can’t exorcise the searing memory of Friedkin and Blatty’s The Exorcist, which even forty years later remains a landmark film in the genre.

Cult Movie Review: The Devil Inside (2012)

Director William Brent Bell’s The Devil Inside (2012) is another “found footage” horror film of recent vintage, and one that has met with -- big surprise here -- widespread critical and audience derision. 

And yet plainly, The Devil Inside is not a profoundly bad movie in the way that The Apparition (2012) is, for example.

In fact, much of the Bell film is intriguing, involving, and well-acted. 

In addition, this horror film intelligently addresses its fascinating subject matter -- the apparently similar natures of mental illness and demonic possession in terms of “brain functioning”-- right up until its emotionally unsatisfying and borderline craven valedictory moment.

I’m a stalwart defender of found footage horror films…at least the good ones.  I’ve come to the conclusion that most mainstream critics simply don’t like the form, just as they also never liked the slasher format, or the torture porn format, and have thus tuned out even the better examples of the sub-genre.   These reviewers aren’t taking each example of the found-footage film on its own merits, in other words, but instead lumping ‘em all together as “bad,” a priori.

And indeed, there are plenty of superior found footage movies out there (again, The Blair Witch Project [1999], [REC] [2007] and Cloverfield [2008] leap to mind), but at least The Devil Inside doesn’t make some of the (apparently crowd-pleasing) mistakes of the Paranormal Activityseries in terms of spoon-feeding the audience information.  I suppose I enjoyed the film on that basis alone.  It doesn’t talk down to you.

Even The Devil Inside’s unsatisfactory ending is borderline defensible, after a fashion, on the basis of the found-footage template and structure, even if the denouement fails to satisfy intellectually and on human terms. 

In short, The Devil Inside is a good deal more accomplished than most critics claimed argued, though not a film without some considerable flaws, as I’ll acknowledge and enumerate below.

 “In all my years in the Church, I’ve seen the Devil more often than I’ve seen God.”

The Devil Insideopens with a 911 recording from a murderer in the year 1989.  Housewife Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) confesses to the murder of three clergy (two priests and a nun) in her home, and is quickly taken into custody by the police. 

In 2009, Maria’s grown daughter, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) teams up with a filmmaker, Michael Shaeffer (Ionut Grama) to make a documentary about her mother’s case. 

In particular, Isabella worries that madness is in her genes and that it is “just a matter of time” before she goes insane like her mother did.

Isabella and Michael travel to Rome and the Vatican, where Isabella attends a Catholic class on the subject of exorcism.  Although the Church denies that Maria is demonically possessed, two excitable young priests, Father David (Evan Helmuth) and Father Ben (Simon Quarterman) agree to help Isabella understand the rite of exorcism by allowing her to film their illicit, non-sanctioned exorcisms.

At the site of the first exorcism -- in a  creepy basement -- David warns Michael to keep Isabella behind him, an oblique reference to “transference,” the capacity of a demon to leap from one body to another.

Then, after examining Maria at the Centrino Hospital, Ben and David unadvisedly rush into an exorcism of Isabella’s mother, and determine that four separate demonic entities may be residing inside her. 

Finally, after the exorcism apparently releases Maria from torment and possession, David, Michael, Ben and Isabella each begin to act strangely…belligerently.  During a routine baptism, Father David attempts to drown a baby.  Then, upon returning home to his apartment, he kills himself…

When Isabella begins to seize and undergo unnatural contortions, Ben and Michael rush her to the nearest hospital, wondering if the evil inside Maria has spread to them.

“Is it in my genes?”

Bell’s 2012 horror film seems to suffer from two primary and not inconsiderable flaws. The first is the film’s widely-despised and inconclusive ending, and the second involves some third-act “reality TV confessional”-style hemming-and-hawing that plays more like housemate bickering on Big Brother than legitimate character interaction, at least given the film’s setting and situation.

First, let’s dissect the ending.  

The movie reaches a kind of crescendo of madness in a speeding car and then…it stops.  It just stops. Nothing gets resolved and nothing gets fixed.  There's no closure. The film cuts to black, and a URL is thrown-up (though not literally vomited...) onto black screen.  The broadcasting of a URL so quickly -- instead of following the end credits, for instance -- plays as insulting to an audience still engaged in the narrative and characters.  The joke “too soon” comes to mind.  The marketing ploy -- go to this web site to learn more! -- plays as slick advertisement.

Yet, much of the wide-spread criticism of The Devil Inside’s ending qualifies as sort of damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t thinking.  I’ve read dozens of reviews of found footage films in which critics complain vociferously about characters in said films “filming everything,” even beyond sense and their own survival instinct.  I agree, it can seem contrived if done poorly.  The standard, blanket refrain in the REC movies, for instance, is that "the people deserve to know what's happening!"  Therefore, the camera-person keeps filming.  It can get...silly.

So along comes a movie -- The Devil Inside -- that exploits the form of the “found footage”-style and comes to a final, irrevocable stop at a catastrophic but logical point…a point when nobody could rightly continue filming the story. 

So do the same critics applaud the filmmakers for adhering rigorously to “realism" in their chosen format?

Of course, not.  Instead, they complain that the movie has no formalized or conventional ending.

While I can understand the complaints about the ending seeming like a marketing ploy (with the sudden, poorly-timed broadcasting of a URL on the screen), I would ask for some degree of consistency of argument on the part of the critics.  You can’t complain all the time that the form of found footage is contrived, and then also turn around complain when a found footage film attempts to overcome that contrivance logically.

I actually found the second problem I named above more irksome: the reality TV aspects of the narrative.  

I’ve seen many found footage films of late -- as the reviews on this blog attest -- and many of the films feature relatively weak or diffident acting.  I was impressed in The Devil Inside, however with Crowley, Quartman, and Helmuth, particularly.  

But at one point during the third act, the main characters go before the camera and in talking-head confessional style, begin to bitch about their friends.  I get, of course, the idea that they are becoming argumentative and disruptive because of latent demonic possession/transference (!), but a decade of bad reality programming doesn’t allow the moment to play successfully in that vein.  It’s all very Big Brother-esque, and not in a good way, either.  These moments, especially with Michael on camera being contrary for no particular or apparent reason, nearly sink the film’s last act.

On the plus side, however, The Devil Inside features two point-blank scenes of exorcism which are harrowing and horrific in the extreme.  The first scene occurs in a dark, dank basement and is, in a word, unforgettable.  The setting is grim and scary, and the physical effects -- including a moment of prodigious vaginal bleeding -- will shock you.  

The second exorcism occurs in the Centrino Medical Facility (in Rome) and is effectively shot, if not quite as startling as the first scene.

Also worthy of mention here is actress Suzan Crowley, who gives a kudos-worthy, utterly unglamorous performance as the possibly-possessed, possibly mentally-ill character, Maria Rossi.  There’s a scene early in the film wherein Maria’s daughter, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) visits the sick woman in the Centrino sanitarium, and Crowley crafts a moment of spiraling madness that proves quite powerful.  

In this “interview” scene there are no Exorcist-style pyrotechnics or Emily Rose-type make-up effects to fall back on, but Crowley -- alternately docile and tempestuous -- puts a fine point on the movie’s central debate: pinpointing the line between psychiatric disorder and demonic possession.  The actress gives a truly accomplished and three-dimensional performance in a way that is, in some fashion, scarier than the scenes featuring a contortionist.  When you look at Crowley's Rossi, you see a very sick, very deranged, very dangerous person, whatever the specifics of her ailment.  Crowley imbues all her scenes with a strong sense of unpredictability, and that unpredictability creates anxiety in the viewer.

I also appreciated how the film spells out the four qualifications for recognizing demonic possession, and how the young priests use cutting-edge science to help them make a diagnosis, ultimately.  Much of what happens in the film’s last act involves the fulfillment (and subversion) of the four stated qualifications.   Furthermore, I admired the way the film took Isabella's  personal quest from one of self-discovery to one of self-fulfilling prophecy.   I’ll confess, I found these touches clever enough  to keep me engaged and interested.

If you love horror films and found footage horror films, and if -- God bless you – you followed me through my positive review of Apollo 18 (2011) and agreed with my conclusions, then The Devil Inside may be right up your alley.

Cult Movie Review: Prophecy (1979)

Prophecy (1979) is a socially-conscious “environmental” horror movie from prestigious director John Frankenheimer (1930 – 2002), the talent behind cinematic classics Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964) and, more recently, Ronin (1998).

All those films have in common a brand of technical precision and visual brilliance that isn’t often paralleled, especially in today’s cinema. 

So the clumsy nature of Prophecy indeed remains a baffling puzzle.  The film is alternately brilliant and inept in terms of staging, editing, direction, and pacing.  Some scenes of suspense are absolutely spell-binding, whereas many of the more visceral moments -- including an animal attack on unsuspecting campers -- play as unintentionally hilarious.

Recently, I reviewed another environmental horror movie from a “mainstream” director, The Bay (2012) by Barry Levinson. That film, however, managed to maintain a consistent tone throughout, even if in the final analysis the director’s message (about water contamination) played as more important than the movie’s genre trappings. 

The odd thing about Prophecy is that the film is so damned inconsistent.  It’s a work of art of great, praise-worthy highs and sad, sad lows. 

On one hand, the movie intelligently charts the uncomfortable nexus of big business/government/environment/pollution, and on the other hand, it consumes itself with gory moments of decapitation, bloody mutations, and other macabre tricks of the trade.  Now, I happen to like such tricks of the trade, but Prophecy proves jarring at significant junctures because it can’t stick to a particularly tone, either the high-minded “cerebral” horror route, or the messy pathway of bleeding viscera.

As I wrote in a Memory Bank post before Christmas, here, I remember well the year 1979 and the cinematic battle royale between Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Prophecy, two horror films that involved (at least in their ad campaigns…) horrible monstrosities hatched from eggs.  Alien, however, ascended to masterpiece status while Prophecy remains a cult oddity.  Watching the two films back-to-back, one can see why one effort succeeded and the other effort failed. Scott’s film maintains a consistent tone of suspense, surprise and curiosity, while Prophecy lurches from environmental polemic to soap opera, to mad monster party.

At the time of the film’s release, critics were generally unkind to Frankenheimer’s genre film too.

In The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “Mr. Frankenheimer treats this material with the kind of majesty usually reserved for movies about Cleopatra, Napoleon and General Patton.  "Prophecy," which opens today at Loews Astor Plaza and other theaters, is full of lingering lap-dissolves and elegant camera movements that suggest history is being made. Leonard Rosenman's soundtrack music is so grand it could be played at a coronation, and it's so loud that it pierces the ears and threatens the head.  None of this fits the movie, which includes a fight between a man with an ax and a man with a portable power saw, and a number of attacks by the mutant monsters on random campers and forest rangers as well as on the film's principal players. For extra gore, there's the obligatory decapitation and the strong suggestion that one fellow is bitten in half at the waist.”

Writing in The New Yorker, Susan Lardner likened the Frankenheimer horror film to an “ill-cut jigsaw puzzle re-assembled by force by someone who has lost a few of the pieces.” (July 2, 1979, pages 66-67). 

And writing for The Progressive, Kenneth Turan noted the goofiness of the monster: “Unfortunately, Prophecy begins to unravel the first time we get a good look at the monster, a berserk mess that resembles a nightmare version of Smokey the Bear.” (September 1979, pages 38 – 39).

Still, the film had at least one prominent defender in Master of Horror Stephen King, who copped to having seen the film three times.  He felt that “settling into Prophecy is as comfortable as settling into an old easy-chair and visiting with good friends.”  While he noted that the monster is “pretty hokey looking,” he admitted to loving the “old monster” as a spiritual sister to Godzilla, Mighty Joe Young, or Gorgo. (Danse Macabre; A Berkley Book; 1981, pages 205–206).

I should admit that I have seen this particular film, myself, considerably more than three times, and that I possess a kind of love/hate relationship with the bloody thing.  Portions of Prophecy are extraordinarily rendered, namely a scene of high-suspense set in an underground tunnel, while other scenes are either cringe-worthy or intoxicating in their badness, depending on your love of bad movie tropes.  Prophecy is self-important and preachy, yet it also possesses wondrous bad taste in terms of what it reveals on screen.

Some might (accurately) note that I have often praised horror movies on the blog that showcase just such lack of decorum.  The problem arises, for this viewer anyway, in balancing the film’s incredible highs and lows. I can appreciate bad taste as much as the next fellow, but Prophecy is schizophrenic in approach.

“Here everything grows big.  Real big.”

In a forest in Maine, a rescue expedition is murdered by an unseen monster. 

Not long after, an environmentalist named Rob (Robert Foxworth) is assigned to determine the destiny of that very forest, because it is at the center of a dispute between American Indians and a local, industrial paper mill.  Rob visits the forest with his wife, Maggie (Talia Shire) a cellist who has just learned that she is pregnant, but is reluctant to reveal the information to her husband.

In Maine, Rob and Maggie meet Mr. Isely (Richard Dysart), the paper mill owner, who tells them that lumberjacks and rescuers have disappeared in the woods and that he feels the Indians are responsible.  He thinks they are attempting to bring to life an ancient legend about a monster with the eyes of a dragon, called Katadin.  Rob soon meets John Hawkes (Armande Assante), the leader of the local Native Americans, and is not so certain his motives are impure.

Upon deeper investigation of the forest, Rob learns that the Indian people are suffering from a host of unusual maladies.  Their babies are being born deformed, and many locals are losing their mental faculties, as if suffering from brain damage. 

When Rob sees several mutated examples of the local wildlife (including a giant tadpole…) he becomes convinced that the paper mill is somehow contaminating the water supply.  He finds evidence that mercury is being used in the mill’s refining process because it is cheap and effective. However, mercury contamination can also decimate healthy nervous systems.  Worse, it can jump the placental barrier and deform a developing fetus, a fact which terrifies Maggie since she has eaten contaminated fish.

As Rob, Maggie, and Hawkes investigate further, Katadin -- a giant, mutated bear-- strikes again and again, even murdering a family of campers. 

After Rob and Maggie take possession of one of Katadin’s mutated offspring, the Mama Bear turns her murderous eye towards their party, and a night of terror and death ensues.

“It’s not the hours.  It’s the damned futility.”

Bad reputation to the contrary, there are moments of pure beauty and sleek terror in Prophecy.  The film was lensed in gorgeous, mountainous British Columbia, and Frankenheimer and cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr. certainly have an eye for capturing the picturesque terrain.  The movie features moments of breathtaking natural beauty, particularly in long, establishing shots.  Much of the film’s running time is spent outdoors, in mysterious terrains of heavy mist, or impenetrable black lakes.

In contrast to those moments, the film also features moments of pure human ugliness.  The paper mill is first seen in a long, moving establishing shot (from the vantage point of a helicopter in flight, approaching), and its dominance over the natural landscape is evident immediately.  The approach to the environment-destroying paper mill is accompanied by Leonard Rosenman’s Wagnerian score, and the moment achieves a kind of portentous, ominous feel.

Similarly, I can’t write enough positive words about a sustained scene, late in the film, during which Rob, Maggie, Isely, Hawkes and a few others hide from Mama Katadin in a subterranean tunnel system. 

These shots of terrified survivors are artistically composed, making extraordinary use of foreground and background fields, to capture the terror of those trapped in the caves.  Frankenheimer’s editor (Tom Rolf) cuts brilliantly from one shot of worried survivors’ faces to another shot, to another…and the suspense builds and builds until it feels palpable.

I admire this sequence inProphecy in large part because it remembers that horror films must possess peaks and valleys, cacophony and silences.  This scene represents the (brief) calm between surrounding storms, but every moment of apparent “peace” is spent worrying about the next attack.

Just look at some of these beautiful shots, pictured below.  The blocking, the color palette, the focus on faces near and far, big and small, sell the terror of what remains unseen in the frame. 

Note as well the image of the old Indian man, Ramona’s grandfather M’rai (George Clutesi) as flames are reflected upon his eye glasses.  This is a shot that visually reveals how his world has been destroyed; how his people’s “protector” (Katadin) is actually but another destroyer, a monster.  

Again, you’ve got to give the devil his due here.  Frankenheimer knows how to stage and execute powerful visuals, and Prophecy features many such compositions.

Yet for every such moment of eloquent, sterling visualization, Prophecy also features sequences of horror that are, in a word, laughable.

The most ridiculous (and yet beloved…) of these sequences involves the giant bear attack on a family of innocent campers.  The bear approaches the sleeping campers, and one young camper -- wrapped up in a yellow sleeping bag and resembling nothing so much as a giant banana (or perhaps a condom…) -- tries to hop away from danger. 

The hopping away from danger is funny enough on its own, but then Katadin’s tail whacks the unlucky lad, hurtling him into a rock at warp speed…where the camper literally explodes on-screen.  

After the camper and sleeping bag are pulped, feathers (from the sleeping bag, apparently), rain down, blanketing the frame.    Generously speaking, the moment plays as high camp.

Or to put it another way, this scene is hilarious in a way the filmmakers surely did not intend.  We were not meant to laugh at the murder of an innocent child, yet all the creative decisions in the scene are questionable…and risible. 

Why make the unfortunate camper hop about vainly in the sleeping bag, instead of unzipping the bag, exiting it, and running from danger? 

Why does the strike of Katadin’s tail hurl the camper through the air at speeds defying the laws of Physics? 

And why make the camper and bag literally explode, and include the ridiculous sight of what appear to be chicken feathers falling to Earth?

Listen, I love horror movies and also boast a tremendous love for “bad” movies, or even genre movies that violate decorum.  But the sleeping bag scene is so ridiculously vetted that it actually damages the credibility of Prophecy. 

Similarly, the film’s valedictory moment -- with a rubbery second mutant rearing its ugly head -- ends Prophecy on a low note.  The monster looks awful in the light of day, under the full glare of sunlight, and the moment is simply a pitiful “sting in the tail/tale” hoping against hope for a sequel.  Like the sleeping bag scene, the final punch of Prophecy is humorously inept.

I wrote in Horror Films of the 1970s(2002) that Prophecy is “sometimes obvious, sometimes clever” in its approach to its thematic material, and over a decade later, I feel I can stand by that assessment. 

The film’s best scene is actually one far away from the “monster movie” material, and set at a place of "real-life: human horror: the paper mill.  As if shooting a documentary, Frankenheimer’s probing camera tours a real-life factory, a massive industrial park dedicated to transforming nature’s logs into shredded pulp.

Filmed in both exterior and interior with long informative pans across its grotesque girth, the mill is revealed to be an ugly, dehumanizing place dedicated solely to environmental destruction.  Chemicals such as chlorine are deployed here, and the plant’s interior is bathed in an ugly, sterile, green-white light.

No preaching is necessary here because one of the prime gifts of film as an art form is its ability to reveal things to audiences that they have never seen before, but which nonetheless exist.  I’ve never been to a paper mill, but Prophecycertainly makes a compelling case about one's capacity for destruction.  I also like how the film attempts to portray Isely’s character in less-than-villainous terms.  The paper mill owner makes a memorable speech about supply and demand, one that reminded me of my own career as a professional writer and consumer of paper.

I’ve written how many books?  And how many copies have been sold?  How many pieces of paper is that, exactly?

How many trees destroyed is that?

I’m also on the fence here regarding Frankenheimer’s treatment of Maggie.  This is a character that learns she is likely carrying a mutated fetus in her womb.  Maggie becomes so obsessed with this (horrific) idea that she takes Katadin’s youngling as her own, essentially, during the film’s last act, carrying it round on her shoulder and protecting it from harm.  At one point, the monster baby seems to nurse from the blood on Maggie’s neck-wound, furthering the metaphor of mother-and-child.  Yet the film gives the audience no catharsis regarding Maggie’s ultimate disposition. 

Does she deliver the baby or undergo an abortion? Is the baby born mutated or healthy?  If it is mutated, can Maggie and Rob love it anyway?

Prophecy doesn’t provide any information or dramatic closure on this key character/plot point, instead focusing on that rubbery final sting-in-the-tail/tale.  In the end, the dopey monster movie aspects of the film thus win out over the excavation of character and theme.  I sure hope Talia Shire complained, because it's clear from her performance she gave the film her all.

Prophecy is one of those horror films that I return to at least once or twice every five or so years, and I suspect that is the case because there’s so much potential evident in the film.  In certain moments, Prophecy possesses a kind of undeniable visual poetry.  In other moments, it is pure, unadulterated schlock. 

I suppose that as an optimistic film reviewer I return to Prophecy again and again because I keep hoping to see something that I’ve missed or overlooked, or to discover that somehow the balance of poetry to schlock has changed for the better.

As of this 2013 viewing, however, it hasn’t. 

I’ll let you know in 2020 if I feel differently.  Meanwhile, below you'll find Prophecy sleeping bag kill in all its bloody glory.