Known as a major critical disaster, John Frankenheimer’s eco-horror picture is conventional monster exploitation given high production values and a screenplay laden with environmental lectures. Tossed into a credibility-challenged wilderness ordeal, Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante and Richard Dysart battle a 12-foot mutant bear on an urgent ursine killing spree. The film’s fixation on horrible birth defects is appropriate to the context, yet still unpleasant. One compensation is cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr.’s impressive Panavision forest vistas.

Prophecy
4K Ultra HD only
KL Studio Classics
1979 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 102 min. / Street Date May 20, 2025 / available through Kino Lorber / 44.95
Starring: Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante, Richard Dysart, Victoria Racimo, Tom McFadden, Charles H. Gray, Graham Jarvis, Kevin Peter Hall, Kevin Peter Hall, Eric Mansker.
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Jr.
Production Designer: William Craig Smith
Special makeup effects: The Burman Studio
Costumes: Ray Summers
Film Editor: Tom Rolf
Composer: Leonard Rosenman
Written by David Seltzer
Produced by Robert L. Rosen
Directed by John Frankenheimer

Roger Corman once said that he could no longer produce exploitation theatrical movies on a shoestring, because the majors were now making his brand of market-oriented film fare, but spending millions on it. That may have been the curse visited on John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy, a lavish horror thriller with a serious identity problem. It marked for Frankenheimer a serious turning point in what had been a phenomenal career. The genius from the Golden Age of live television had an incredible run of classy entertainment in the 1960s ( Birdman of Alcatraz,  The Train,  Grand Prix), including several titles that had important things to say:  The Manchurian Candidate,  Seven Days in May,  Seconds.

Released in 1979, Prophecy simply got clobbered by the critics. Not only were the reviews terrible, the pre-release buzz was extremely negative. Frankenheimer’s movie was all but forgotten in the wake of Ridley Scott’s Alien, which was still doing business three months after its June premiere.

The ad campaign for Prophecy depicted a horrid mutant monster in what looks like an egg, suggesting that the marketers were angling for the Alien audience. The discussion of H.R. Giger’s perverse expression of Extreme Insect Fear never seemed to stop. All that people had to say about Frankenheimer’s film was, “it was just a mutant bear.”  Ouch.

The script was by David Seltzer, who had earned considerable horror cred as the screenwriter of 1976’s big hit The Omen. As finished, Prophecy takes itself very, very seriously, a bad omen for its genre. Rob (Robert Foxworth) is a city health inspector shocked and dismayed by the living conditions in NYC’s ghetto, as if he had just recently learned about such ‘social problems.’ He’s stressed out about environmental dangers and doesn’t believe in bringing children into this poisonous world. That troubles his loving wife Maggie (Talia Shire), because she’s looking for the right moment to tell Rob that she’s pregnant. A government expert then arrives to ask Bob to use his ‘people skills’ to resolve a dispute in Maine, where Indian activist John Hawks (Armand Assante) is leading a revolt against a big lumber company that Hawks claims is destroying traditional Indian lands through pollution. Some murders have occurred, for which the lumbermen blame the Indians. Rob’s expertise is needed to determine if the pollution claim is legit.

The baby news has to wait while Rob and Maggie rush up to Maine. Lumber mill rep Isely (Richard Dysart) gives the investigators the full charm routine, while John Hawks comes off as a radical. After an encounter that turns violent, Rob and Maggie go off by themselves to an isolated cabin, where they encounter some oversized wildlife, and a raccoon that attacks them as if it were rabid. Rob instantly theorizes that mercury contamination from Isley’s paper mill has affected the animals’ metabolism and nervous systems. It also would account for the Native American plague of miscarriages and deformed infants that John Hawks and his wife Ramona (Victoria Racimo) have told them about.

Isely claims without proof that John Hawks’s protesters are culpable for the grisly deaths of five lumbermen. When some campers are found massacred in a similar manner, Isely brings in the law to arrest Hawks’s dissidents — and instead comes face-to-face with the twelve-foot monster that’s been causing all of the trouble. Twenty miles up in the hills, the desperate survivors must find a way to get to safety, while menaced by a creature that can’t be stopped.

Prophecy was in no way a cheap movie. A short episode introducing star Talia Shire’s character is staged with an entire orchestra and concert audience. The lush Canadian scenery is given precise aerial photography and beautiful Panavision cinematography in varied weather conditions. The main monster appears to be a mutated, partly hairless bear. Its appearance is so gnarly, it looks like a transitory phase of Rob Bottin’s  The Thing, or the inside-out monkey from Cronenberg’s remake of  The Fly.

Adding to the unpleasantness are two additional nasties, horrible fetal mutant newborns. The pink & oozy things howl and whine in pain. As she flees the killer Mama bear, Maggie cradles one of the squealing things in her arms. The infant monster mirrors Maggie’s fear for her own unborn baby, which may be mutated as well — she’s been eating the local mercury-laden fish. The situation is also reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s  The Birds. When its terrorized family chooses to flee from a mass bird attack, young Veronica Cartwright insists on bringing her ‘innocent’ pet lovebirds with her.

Prophecy was created by smart people looking to legitimize the lowly monster movie, but it doesn’t even satisfy undemanding monster fans. ‘Ecological Sci-fi horror’ had proliferated in the first half of the decade. ‘Animals in revolt’ movies had become a joke, with oversized frogs and even  bunny rabbits. More serious ecosystem apocalypse stories blamed bureaucrats and business profiteers and offered no solutions. Prophecy spends 3/4 of its running time establishing a crisis that Sci-fans tired of in the first few minutes. We get an earful of righteous ranting and raving on the environment, with additional editorial comment bemoaning the injustice dealt to blacks and Native Americans. The show then abandons those themes, and rushes into an extended  Deliverance– like survival ordeal in the forests of Maine.

Sending Robert Foxworth’s health inspector to Maine makes little sense. Four lumbermen ripped to shreds in the wild would bring in an army of law enforcement. A quick look at the corpses would point suspicion away from Armand Assante’s Native American activists. And any ecological assessment would involve a team, not a lone medico specializing in urban welfare. If Rob is supposed to be issue-neutral in the rural dispute, why is he implanted on the lumbermen’s side?  Rob is soon mansplaining the science to Maggie, using her as a conduit to lecture the audience.

In this movie, by the way, the Native Americans call themselves Indians, even on their own protest signs. The lumbermen disrespectfully call them ‘Opies,’ as in ‘Original People.’  Good intentions aside, Prophecy would appear to flunk the Marlon Brando – Sacheen Littlefeather test.

There isn’t a laugh to be found in this show, although we do feel like laughing when Richard Dysart’s lumber flack sees a mutant bear cub, and suddenly confesses that he’s been dishonest all along — he knows darn well the paper mill is poisoning people but has been ‘in denial.’ Dysart plays this so well we almost feel sorry for him. But what industrial polluter, mass oil-spiller, or general despoiler of the Earth has ever for a minute fessed up to anything?

At the end of Act Two all of the film’s ‘big issues’ are left up in the air: John Hawks’ revolt, the lumbermen’s accusations, the source of the monster mutations, the status of Maggie’s baby or the state of their marriage. With appearance of the Mutant Mama Bear, Prophecy goes into action-horror mode. Supporting extras are wiped out as people start being killed in reverse billing order. Victims are dashed against rocks, set on fire, their heads bitten off. It’s gruesome but not really frightening — because we don’t really know or care about many of them.

Frankenheimer tries to create suspense episodes out of thin air. In one driving sequence the cutting pace and Leonard Rosenman’s music rise to a fever pitch, but then subside again, with nothing having happened. The monster entrances come just when we expect them — two or three beats after the suspense music subsides. We intuit that it’s time for Ursa Major Ugliamus to pop up and roar, and it’s no surprise when he does. Rob and John Hawks act noble, and fight back with a bow & arrow and a rifle; Maggie and Ramona cower on the sidelines and scream, to let us know they’re there.

We’re told that Frankenheimer was unhappy because scenes with graphic violence were been trimmed because Paramount wanted to obtain a PG rating. Going all-out with gore was certainly common enough in horror pix, but big studios couldn’t skip the ratings process, as George Romero had done the previous year with his independently produced  Dawn of the Dead. If a Prophecy rough cut had shown its potential to be another vomit-bag sensation like  The Exorcist, we think Paramount might have gone all the way.

But the truth is that Prophecy doesn’t distinguish itself. The moment we see the father and kids starting a camping trip, we know they will soon become Bear Chow. Frankenheimer does nothing to make us care if they survive. The monster then kills off all the interesting characters just to have something to do. The show seems really eager to rush to a finish. Practically the moment the dust settles, The End arrives, leaving several main character issues unresolved. We have no idea if Rob and Maggie will sort out their differences. How bad is that nasty bite to her neck? Will she become a Mutant Bear Vampire?

It’s not easy to find a major studio release that was this badly received by the critics. The L.A. Times snuck into a preview screening and reported that the film elicited “hissing, booing and shouting from the audience.”  A New York Times review said it was basically the same movie as Bert Gordon’s A.I.P. low-rent loser  The Food of the Gods. The cast is attractive and competent, but held back by the material. Robert Foxworth may or may not have told Frankenheimer that he had starred in a TV movie about killer ants.

Yet Variety reported that Prophecy was considered a box office hit, one of Paramount’s more successful summer movies. We had expected a picture with problems, but not one that showed so little director acumen, especially from a favorite director known for doing great things with challenging subject matter. For flaky thrillers associated with political issues, we prefer Michael Wadleigh’s  Wolfen — it also doesn’t land on its feet, but it has great writing and several superb episodes. For crazoid Bears Gone Wild gore thrills, we had much more fun with  Cocaine Bear, a gore comedy that makes stupid horror tropes into a big plus.

The KL Studio Classics 4K Ultra HD only of Prophecy looks really good; we’re told that it debuts a new HDR/Dolby Vision Master derived from a 4K scan of the original negative. Cinematographer Harry Strading Jr. keeps the screen popping with beautiful scenery in all kinds of weather; the added contrast ratio of UHD shows in the title sequence, with nothing but flashlights in a sea of black. The cutting does a pretty good job of keeping the main monster looking ferocious. In some silhouettes it looks like a bear, and in some close-ups its naked muzzle seems more piglike than ursine.

Kino has inherited a stack of extras produced by Shout Factory in 2019, with interviews obtained from the two main stars, the screenwriter, and three artisans responsible for the film’s monster effects. As could be expected, the conversations all drift to speculation about John Frankenheimer’s intentions for the show, and what may have gone wrong. The makeup expert talks about some of the more gruesome gore effects that were cut from the film.

A reminder about this 4K-only release. The Blu-ray disc in the set is for the video extras only. This particular package has no separate Blu-ray feature encoding.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Prophecy
4K Ultra HD only rates:
Movie: Fair +
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent5.1 Surround and Lossless 2.0 Audio
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Bryan Reesman and Max Evry
Interview featurettes:
All of Our Sins with Actress Talia Shire (18:59)
Bearing Up with Actor Robert Foxworth (10:02)
Bear and Grit It with Screenwriter David Seltzer (13:13)
Hard to Bear with Make-Up Effects Designer Tom Burman (19:34)
Prophecy Prodigy with Make-Up Effects Artist Allan Apone (21:14)
The Man Behind the Mask with Mime Artist Tom McLoughlin (21:51)
Radio Spots
Theatrical Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: May 29, 2025
(7335prop)

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