The film Prophecy has stayed with me for decades, but it took me three years (from its release on blu in 2019 to now) to upgrade from DVD, which I ultimately did this week. That very nearly says all that I need to say about the film - much can be inferred from my hesitancy, as well as my ultimately succumbing; but there is still stuff that bears telling about my history with the film and the related book...
I began my experience with the movie through David Seltzer's novel, also published in 1979 (he wrote the screenplay before he novelized it, a bit of a bass-ackwards way of doing it, but actually probably not a bad way of going about telling a story, using the screenplay to get at the underlying structure before fleshing it out with description in the novel). It is very likely I got it second hand, a few years after it first came out; I was an avid reader, by the time I was 13, of horror writers like Robert Bloch and HP Lovecraft, and even more mainstream writers like Stephen King. While neither of these images were on the front cover of the first copy of Prophecy I owned - which in fact had a mere, boring forest scene on the front - I could not have resisted, as a kid, a novel with covers like this:
Or this:
The book fascinated me as a kid. I probably grew to esteem the outdoor ordeal films Clearcut and Rituals - my two favourite Canadian film productions - as much as I do because of my early childhood experiences with Prophecy. I formulated a rule of thumb at some point that any film that begins with people flying into a remote location in a small plane is probably worth watching, and in fact, Prophecy - the film - contains just such a scene, prefiguring the moment in Clearcut when Ron Lea looks out the window and sees logged forest. Here, we see not logged forest, but log booms, floating on the water:
...which of course says "BC" to those of us who live here, because this is a frequent sight hereabouts. As a kid - before the world went crazy for safety - I used to climb out on booms like these with my friends. I recall once that the oolichan - candlefish - were running, and I tested something I had heard was true, and indeed it was: if you plunged your arm down into the water - I would have been likely lying face-down on the edge of the boom at this point - you could come up with a fish in your hands. It's true! (I have no idea if oolichan still spawn in such numbers).
Of course, logging has always been an issue in BC for people who were environmentally-attuned, but it's not a major one in the book or the film. It isn't the cutting of trees itself which is the environmental issue at the core of the novel, but the effects of a chemical added to the logs to protect them as they float in the water. The story, when you strip away the white saviour and monster movie elements, is essentially one of a Native community in Maine that is impacted by methyl mercury poisoning, due to negligence on the part of the pulp mill; the presence of PMT in the food chain leads to both deformed babies - the book was where I first read about Minamata disease, too - and a rampaging mutant animal, shown in embryo form on the cover. The descriptions of activism on the part of two of its main Native characters in the book were among the first I ever read of any sort of activism - before I became aware, even, of the Squamish Five, say - and fit in with stories I had heard about land disputes and the other things that trickled into my childlike sense that something was not right in the world I'd been born into. I had heard stories about land claims in the news, had seen movies like Little Big Man and Soldier Blue on late night TV - the latter ending on some very stark images of whites committing genocide. And I was aware of the racism around me, though in a raw, childlike, innocent way, when white people around me went off on racist rants about - trigger warning? - "chugs" expecting the government to take care of them, while "ordinary folks" (= we whites) had to work for a living. It was a theme that came up frequently in discussions of the so-called Indian problem, the solution to which was invariably - to the suburban rednecks I grew up among - that "we should just stop giving them handouts and make them all assimilate; we won, they lost, and they've got to get over it." I think that it's safe to call that the dominant attitude towards First Nations among the people I grew up around, and I knew there was something very wrong with it, which I tried to argue with, using what few tools I had as a kid. Crap culture or not, books like Prophecy helped fill in a few blanks for me, were often the place where I could get exposed to the plainest speech about issues like this, and fueled my curiosity, too...
Even if the political angle hadn't been there - or if I hadn't been curious about it - Prophecy would have fascinated me as an outdoor ordeal story. I lived close enough to the woods, and went into the woods around me often enough, that stories set in them, or involving the creatures that lived in them, had resonance; I remember an even earlier outdoor ordeal novel I had signed out from my elementary school library, one written for children, prosaically called Sasquatch Adventure, involving kids held in a cave by a clan of Bigfoot (I am half-considering ordering that off Abebooks to revisit it - especially since I see it is a small-press BC publication!). I also read a sort of "outdoor adventure" of a different sort, in the form of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (which I was into because of the dinosaurs, of course, but the most memorable scene - the giant tick attack - doesn't even have any!). And from devouring anthologies of horror fiction, I even recall a Canadian short story - not Algernon Blackwood's - about the Wendigo, which I have not yet been able to track down (I had hoped the film Antlers would maybe be an adaptation of that story, but it wasn't) - it was something about a kid in a basement with an artifact associated with the Wendigo, and the kid's fear that the Wendigo is going to come out of the woods to retrieve it. Hell, I might even have seen Day of the Animals and Rituals on late night TV before I encountered Prophecy, or around the same time. Anything about people fighting to survive when faced with the forest or its representatives - the more monstrous the better! - would have piqued my curiosity back then...
...which makes sense, because I had a more rural upbringing, out in Maple Ridge, than you might imagine. I remember a story - still repeated in cryptozoological circles - about a "lost world" discovered in the Pitt River Valley, with weird horned lizards and - what was it, barking frogs? - and other cryptids (I previously posted on that here). I also vividly remember a bigfoot hoax that made newspapers and traumatized a local bus driver. And while I never encountered any cryptids of my own, I often spent time in the woods, fishing in rivers in lakes, going out catching snakes and frogs, and exploring the ponds and ravines around me for wildlife. There is still something about a good rotten log in the forest that I can't resist turning over, to see what is living under it; and I vividly remember one pond where I used to play, where my friends and I, for fun, more than once put leeches on ourselves, to see what it felt like to have a leech suck your blood and to practice removing them, should we ever need to know how to (note: this proved less useful information for later life than we had imagined at the time, but in case you are curious the trick is to get a lighter hot and hold the metal close to them. You don't even have to touch them; faced with the close proximity of a heat source, the leech will curl up and let go, fall back into the pond, and swim away unharmed).
Anyhow, outdoor ordeal stories resonate against my inner Canadian and my fascination with the woods around me, and Prophecy was a fine read as a child. I don't think I saw the movie at the time, not catching up with it until much later, just due to its sheer unavailability; I don't remember ever seeing it on VHS tape. And though I was impressed with the pulp and paper mill footage (I think I remember reading the mill was in Port Alberni?) and the work of, in particular, Richard Dysart - the doctor in The Thing - as the mill owner - when I finally did see the movie, overall I felt strong disappointment - especially since Prophecy takes the embryonic monsters, shown on the paperback cover and ACTUALLY DESCRIBED THUS in the film's dialogue, and makes them into mere mutant bears - being played by men in costumes. I mean, if you're going to change the creature design, fine, but the art for the paperback and movie poster have a creature with a cat's eye, and Richard Dysart, when he first mentions Katahdin, also notes that it is supposed to have cat's eyes... why keep all that, if the monster isn't going to actually HAVE cat's eyes?
We learn from the extras on the blu that members of the FX team and crew took to describing this guy as the pizza bear:
...And the bears weren't even the worst part of the film. From the first time I saw Prophecy, I was pissed off to realize they had cast (Italian-Irish) Armand Assante, in redface, as John Hawks, the main Indigenous activist. I didn't realize until this week that Victoria Racimo, the other main aboriginal character, was Filipina-Irish, though that somehow seems less objectionable, as at least she doesn't need face paint!
Now, Assante and Racimo are both really good, and sell their characters. There's a scene where Assante, armed with an axe, squares off against a logger with a chainsaw, a key moment of which involves Assante lying on the ground with a running chainsaw at his neck, acting his heart out - which is a hell of a brave scene to shoot, even if the chainsaw had been modified to reduce the danger (as is explained in one of the film's extras, I think by Robert Foxworth).
You are further inclined to cut the film some slack for its laudable political intentions: Assante's character is an activist trying to defend his community against the ravages of toxic chemicals put into the water by the pulp mill, while everyone blames the symptoms they are experiencing - like staggering - on drunkenness. He quickly, given a sympathetic ear, turns on their heads the racist cliches spread about his people, though he remains a supporting player to Foxworth, as an EPA representative with a history of taking on lost causes. Nothing in this film is perfect, but I still don't recall another non-documentary that takes on the issue of water quality on reserves as its key problem, and while there have been a few films since - Erin Brokovich, A Civil Action, Dark Waters - that deal with the impacts of water pollution, they came much later, and had no Indigenous presence whatsoever. So all of this is ahead of its time, still sadly relevant, and very stirring.
Still, another measure of just how far behind the film production was when it comes to cultural sensitivity comes up in David Seltzer's mini-interview featurette on the Scream Factory blu. While a fair number of the interview subjects have very little bad to say about the film or its director, Seltzer is a brutal critic - hell hath no fury like a writer scorned - and provides the funniest and most eye-opening commentary, because he's clearly still pissed off with how far short the movie fell of his hopes. He characterizes director John Frankenheimer as a bit of an egomaniac "Hollywood"-type who was deeply out of his element in making the film, who was drinking too much, and who badly fucked up by making the monster into a mutant bear - though the other idea that gets described in the commentaries, of a chicken-footed, cat-eyed, gilled, beaked, and winged "fusion of all things created" sounds pretty risible too, to be honest. Surprisingly, though, Seltzer's most horrifying anecdote about how messed up things were - whether Seltzer realizes it or not - makes SELTZER HIMSELF look bad: he had wanted his native characters to occasionally speak their own language, but didn't want to do research into this, so used his own made up gobbledygook "Indian language" to fill in the screenplay with... which would be fine, I guess, if he made sure everyone knew that was what he had done, but he didn't. Later on set, he would notice Assante learning the faked-up garble phonetically, earnestly assuming that it was real... which Seltzer further admits he didn't give Assante a heads up about, when he realized what was happening! Presumably when the one actual First Nations actor in the film - Canadian artist George Clutesi, as Hector M'Rai - speaks his non-English lines, he is actually speaking a real language, but Assante is just replicating Seltzer's "filler." Ouch!
It's all kind of sad, and takes some grappling with, such that I think - even with my various predispositions - the first three times I watched the film, it was just about getting over the obvious flubs, coming to terms with them - especially the pizza bear and the Italian-Irish and Filipina-Irish "Indians." There is no getting around these problems, though listening to people who were actually involved in the production laugh about them actually eases some of the sting.
But attempt four to watch the film, last week on DVD, was far more enjoyable than I expected. The locations are stunning - especially the mill. There are some very effective scares in the film, like the raccoon attack! And if the film doesn't work so well as a horror movie, it fares a bit better as an ecological polemic and John Frankenheimer political thriller. Even if you have to rise above some of the bad choices that get made, the underlying story here is a good one, and there's still a lot of talent on display (Talia Shire is really strong, too, as a pregnant woman who realizes too late that she's eaten some potentially contaminated fish). Seltzer mentions at one point how much he'd like to see the film re-made - how much untapped potential there still is in the story - and I've got to agree with him; but in the meantime, if you haven't seen the original 1979 version of Prophecy - well, you should, especially if you have an investment in the BC film industry, because this was an important production, up here. The one extra that for me, as a BC film fan, that is sorely lacking, would have been a featurette on the locations used (akin to what you see on the Severin release of The Changeling, say). Why not tell us where the mill is, for instance, or give some history of it? I think it takes someone (Severin's Kier-la Janisse, say) with local ties to even think things like that are important for BC-shot films - and presumably Severin's new Out of the Blue disc will have a featurette on locations? ...but frankly, regardless of whether a film is Vancouver-shot or not, I don't know why every bonus section doesn't include a "locations" featurette, especially where cool location shoots are involved.
Trivial brag: I was pleased to instantly recognize the main drag in Fort Langley, even though it was being filmed some 40+ years prior to my most recent visit there... That's the Fort Langley Community Hall, masquerading as a hospital...
Finding myself thinking all these things while re-watching my old DVD, I went out and upgraded to blu-ray and started the movie over. Shout Factory's 2019 blu offers a really enjoyable presentation of the film - it looks and sounds great, and while it is not quite as packed with extras as I would have liked, it's cool that they got so many people to provide their stories of the shoot, with interviews with Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, FX artists Tom Burman and Alan Apone, and one of the two guys in bear suits, a mime named Tom McLoughlin (who also is entertainingly take-no-prisoners in his stories, though not as savage to the film as its disappointed author was). In a rare move when it comes to bonus features, I watched them all. Now I'm half-tempted to watch the whole movie again...
It may be that Prophecy is the rare example of a bad movie that gets better each time you watch it... or maybe it's just not that bad in the first place? So if you find yourself put off by the casting or the pizza bear or the sheer indifference to details like you get with the "cat's eye" dialogue, the solution might just be to watch the whole movie again. And there's a good reason to watch it in the best presentation available: with so much else against the film, you don't want to be seeing it in an inferior format!
And don't turn away too soon, because just before the credits roll, you get this cheesy lookin' fella rearing up into the frame - presumably the bear daddy, come to get revenge for our heroes having killed his mate. Go, bear daddy! (Someone really should remake this movie... it could be so much better...).
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