ou know what they say about honey bears/When you shave off all their baby hair/You get a hairy-minded pink bare bear.” – Lou Reed
I’m still not entirely sure what old Lou was getting
at with that lyric, but for me it always brings to mind a certain movie. A movie with the rather audacious tagline: “The monster movie.” The term “uneven” gets bandied about regularly
by film critics, and in fairness it’s often the only mot juste. But rarely have A-, B- and Z-movie elements been combined with such whiplash-inducing aban- don as in Prophecy (1979). In the late, great John Frankenheimer (Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate), we have an A-list director helming an archetypal B-movie starring a mixed bag of A- and B-list actors, with a script by David Seltzer (The Omen), a music score by Oscar-winner Leonard Rosenman (Rebel Without a Cause, Barry Lyndon, The Car) and an endearingly old-school rubber-suit monster that looks pretty damn gnarly but rarely functions to anyone’s satisfac- tion. Following a fantastically
evocative opening sequence with tiny orbs of light dancing against a pitch-black back- ground and the sound of heavy breathing, which turn out to be the flashlight beams of a res- cue party and the panting of bloodhounds, we meet our principal players. Robert Fox- worth (Damien: Omen II, TV’s Six Feet Under) is Rob, a burnt-out inner-city doctor who spends most days treating ghetto babies for rat bites; his wife Maggie (Talia Shire, slumming between Rocky sequels) is a classical musician who can’t bring herself to tell her husband she’s pregnant. Both are ripe for a change of scenery, so when Rob is offered a posi-
RM52
tion as a consultant in a dispute between a paper mill and several local Native Indian tribes in rural Maine, it seems ideal. HAH! Little do they know the dispute is about to be arbitrated in swift and brutal fashion by Katahdin, a legendary local critter that’s allegedly an amalgam of all woodland creatures but basi- cally looks like a giant shaved bear that’s been whupped with God’s own private ugly stick. The creature’s design prob-
lem, however, isn’t just down to wires, seams or zippers – in fact, it’s not a bad-looking getup at all. Trouble is, it can’t interact convincingly with the human performers, so in virtually every attack scene we begin with a jump-scare shot of the monster, a reaction shot and/or chase sequence with the intended vic- tim and conclude with the vic- tim either hitting the ground horribly mutilated or narrowly
escaping. While this device becomes tiresome upon repetition, it certainly doesn’t mar the monster’s ini- tial appearance, a morbidly hilarious sequence now known among fans as the Sleeping Bag Scene, in which a family of campers – including one kid who sets a new record in pathos by attempting to hop away in his sleeping bag – is dispatched by
Katahdin with extreme prejudice. By the time the intrepid Dr. Rob concludes that
Katahdin and a couple of Texas-size tadpoles found nearby are indeed the result of pollution from the paper mill, the inevitable ragtag group of survivors (from both sides of the dispute, natch) discover – wait for it – a butt-ugly, caterwauling baby Katahdin! The pregnant Maggie naturally seizes the opportu- nity to take over and be all nurturing and shit, but before they can get the vile infant back to civilization and strike a blow for Greenpeace, the righteously pissed mama bear shows up and she’s all out of bubblegum. Stephen King, who has repeatedly declared his
undying love for rubber-suit monster movies, is nat- urally a staunch supporter of Prophecy. In his first non-fiction book Danse Macabre, he actually claims to have seen it three times, all the more remarkable given that the book was published less than two years after the film’s release. Still unavailable on DVD, Prophecy lurches back
and forth between clever and stupid like a drunk driver in an ice storm, which is one reason I find it so hard to resist. In time-honoured genre film fash- ion, it’s a stern warning of the ass-kicking that awaits humans who mess with nature. Hey, maybe that’s what Lou Reed was getting at with that cryptic bear-shaving reference! Now get the hell out of my basement before I get my trusty quadruple-blade Gillette Uber-Glide and a can of foamin’ goo and do a spot of long overdue nerdscaping.