Two monster movies. Two rampaging creatures racking up high body counts, one in the Maine woods, one in a massive outer space corporate freighter......
Ridley's monster, a stunning, nightmarish creation designed by H.R. Giger, froze audiences in their seats.....they'd never, in their worst dreams, seen anything like it.
John Frankenheimer's monster, a bear inundated with strawberry sauce, rendered by crude puppetry and mimes in monster suits, invited audience derision and laughter.
This became doubly sad for "Prophecy" since it clearly had higher aspirations, dealing with a man made ecological catastrophe as well as mistreatment of native Americans. Screenwriter David Seltzer took his inspiration from the mercury poisoned coastal village of Minamata, Japan, where a corporation's industrial waste infected the food chain, leading to the birth of deformed babies.
Of course his other inspiration was obviously the creature features of the 1950's where the folly of above ground H-Bomb tests invariably brought out all manner of pissed off giant bugs and dinosaurs.
As described in Seltzer's screenplay and novelization, the "Prophecy" monster should have been one for the ages......since the mercury, released into the eco-system by a nearby paper mill plant, is described as corrupting and mutating a fetus so badly, it would emerge as everything on the evolutionary scale....amphibian, reptile, feline, etc, etc....In other words, your worst nightmare.....
That's what in the script, but it's far from what Frankenheimer got from his special effects crew. As opposed to the groundbreaking Giger beastie, "Prophecy"s effects team delivered a true 1950's monster worthy of Ed Wood Jr.......a guy shambling around in a heavy Halloween costume. To add to this embarrassing amateur night creature, its babies were played by barely movable puppets.
Frankenheimer must have realized how awful his assemblage of miserably constructed mutations looked, .....the monster attack scenes reeked of desperation, with ultra fast cutting to keep anyone from getting a good look at the thing....if you don't blink, you'd glimpse something sort of like Yogi Bear covered in congealed pink frosting.......hardly the evolutionary mash-up described by the writer.....
The appearance of this ridiculous, roaring Muppet pulls the rug out from the film's actors, who've all been giving intense, committed performances, as if the movie was a top notch serious drama. (Armand Assante, playing the activist leader of the Native Americans, juts his profile for the camera as if he's posing to be engraved on the nickel.....Talia Shire, newly pregnant with a fetus potentially dosed with mercury, spends the entire film in agonized worry, as unhappy as when she watches Mr. T. and Dolph Lundgren pound on Sylvester Stallone.)
The actors needn't have bothered.....once Frankenheimer's Jolly Pink Predator rolls through the woods like an angry Rose Bowl Parade float, the movie devolves into simple, Grade Z cheesy fun........to hell with the ecological warnings, we just want to see the big galoot get his monster groove on......swipe people twenty feet in the air, overturn cars, knock down buildings and bite some poor sucker's head off. He doesn't disappoint.
We feel sorry for Frankenheimer......we know he meant to bring directorial professionalism and skill to a genre primarily plowed by hacks.....to do for monster movies what Robert Wise's "The Haunting" did for haunted house movies. And until he's undone by his woeful team of puppeteers, the film comes close to what he had in mind..... as for the rest of it, well let's just say it's a damn good replica of a 1950's big bug/rippling reptile monster mash. And since nobody loves those misbegotten films more than the BQ, we'll claw out 3 stars (***) ......for a Teddy Bears picnic from hell.......
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