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Title: PROPHECY Year: 1979 Rating: ***1/2 |
At one point, when idealistic city doctor Robert Foxworthy and quiet musician wife Taila Shire are in the Oregon woods investigating strange happenings around a Native American community, we cut to an immense paper-mill with formidable music that would usually prelude a march of Nazi soldiers, or their mustached leader...
Meanwhile polite antagonist Richard Dysart, a few years before being part of a gory monstrous takeover in THE THING, is subtly covering things up: overall making the liberal-minded eco-horror PROPHECY far more ambiguous than if it were made today (or in the last thirty-years)...
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Mia Bendixsen in PROPHECY
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Promoted by a movie-trailer without the usual ensemble of scenes, but an entire pivotal sequence where a camping-out family's killed by an unseen menace... the young son slammed against a rock as his sleeping bad explodes into feathers...
Basically your standard body-count slasher kind of thing... but PROPHECY is more an investigative mystery where hit/miss director John Frankenheimer has some creative shots and builds tension semi-aptly...
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Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire in PROPHECY |
And the actors... especially married leads Foxworthy and Shire... are more intensely focused on the enigmatic, perpetually-unfolding plot than the somewhat heavy-handed, preachy theme behind it... curbing Armand Assante's overly-melodramatic turn as a beguiled Indian...
Leading to the famous (or rather infamous) "mutant bear on a rampage" finale that reminds the audience this is a bonafide monster movie albeit far superior in the build-up than what it's clumsily narrowed into.
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Mutant Bear in PROPHECY
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Robert Foxworth in PROPHECY |
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Robert Foxworth in PROPHECY with Taila Shire and Richard Dysart
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Robert Foxworth and Victoria Racimo (later in Falcon Crest) in PROPHECY with Armand Assante
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From John Frankenheimer's PROPHECY |
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