PROPHECY: This Forgotten Mutant Bear Adventure Is a B-Movie For the Ages

In the wake of Jaws’ smash success in 1975, studios started pumping out man vs. monster films. From sewer-dwelling alligators to orcas, Hollywood heroes were fighting everything in Mother Nature’s arsenal. But like Henry VIII, Hollywood had a soft spot for pitting people against killer bears. (Bear-baiting is a contender for the most f*cked-up sport of all time. That and NASCAR racing.) Grizzly in 1976 and Claws in 1977 saw bears tearing up campgrounds, but just when you thought it was safe to go back in the wilderness, along came Prophecy in 1979.

The high bar for Jaws imitators, Prophecy is a B-movie with a brain and an agenda, an impressive, tense, and lean drama about Indigenous rights, environmental exploitation, industrial pollution, tenancy rights, and abortion. Oh, and also there’s a giant mutant bear.

You’re Gonna Need A Bigger Forest

At the outset of Prophecy, a government man (Graham Jarvis) approaches a liberal New York doctor (Robert Foxworth, who looks just like Dr. Jacoby from Twin Peaks) to recruit him to conduct an Environmental Protection Agency report along the Androscoggin River in Maine. The Anishinaabe, Passamaquoddy, Wampanoag, and Yurok tribes there — collectively called “the Opies,” or original peoples, by the characters — are disputing the land ownership of a forest recently purchased by a paper mill. Apparently it’s gone all the way up to the Supreme Court and is pending that EPA report to determine whether the Natives or the loggers will be expelled from the land. Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to make a difference, the noble Dr. Robert Verne agrees to help author the report.

The plot is richly analogous. In the 1970s, environmentalists stepped up forest preservation efforts in the United States. A graduate student at Oregon State University produced research that indicated that the cutting of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest would eventually lead to the extinction of the Northern spotted owl. A task force formed the same decade to determine how much land the owls needed and to provide guidelines for land management. In the 1980s, environmental activists latched onto the cause as a means to save two birds with one stone — prevent the cutting of old-growth forests, and they not only saved the trees, but they saved the endangered owl population, too. At the same time, loggers stepped up their efforts to brute-force their way into forests. In Prophecy, the conflict of Indigenous peoples versus loggers foreshadowed the environmental battles of the 1980s and 1990s as well as more recent Indigenous battles like Standing Rock Sioux Reservation’s protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. In Prophecy, a lumberjack (Everett Creach) duels an Opie activist, John Hawks (Armando Assante), with a chainsaw. He nearly decapitates him. In real life, activists mostly chained themselves to trees, camped out in canopies, or blocked access to forests. Any chainsaw duels, unfortunately, escaped entry into the public record.

Outside the Pacific Northwest, Prophecy had a decade of environmental battles to pull from. The plot recalls the plight of Bitterroot National Forest in Montana, where the controversy arose in the 1960s from invasive cutting methods such as clearcutting and terracing. A Montana senator appointed the dean of the Forestry School at the University of Montana to investigate and author a report. The conflict brought the issue of clearcutting to the national stage and led to Congressional action: The National Forest Management Act of 1976 tried to manage lumber companies’ reckless operations on national forest lands. Youth programs cropped up in the 1970s to teach kids about land management and conservation. The Forest Service created a mascot, Woodsy Owl, whose motto was “Give a hoot. Don’t pollute.” In 1973, the Endangered Species Act severely limited timber-cutting and road construction programs in national forests.

Suffice it to say, Prophecy knows its environmental history. Screenwriter David Seltzer began his career in the 1960s writing for nature specials, including a National Geographic special on Portuguese sailors and an episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau that focused on sharks. (Seltzer was probably unhappy with the demonization of them in Peter Benchley’s book “Jaws” and the subsequent trend of killer shark cinema.) He later wrote the script for a documentary on insects before “making it” in Hollywood: He was brought onto Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to do an uncredited rewrite of Roald Dahl’s script, the first time Seltzer worked on a completed project that wasn’t a documentary. From there, Seltzer was regularly writing fiction screenplays, including The Omen — which surely got him the Prophecy gig.

Despite his background, Seltzer quickly became known only as the guy who wrote Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and The Omen. Prophecy is perhaps the last gasp of the environmentalist within Seltzer before he surrendered to the Hollywood machine. The complex premise and unpretentious discussion of Indigenous rights and environmental justice give the impression that Seltzer had written a script about logging’s impact on Native Americans in the mid-1970s, and when monster movies suddenly came back into vogue, he dusted it off and stuck a giant bear in it. He based the script on the methylmercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan, throughout the early 1900s.

The result in Prophecy is an unusual one: a script that gets its best ideas out in its first hour and then sells out in real time once Seltzer remembers that this giant mutant bear movie has to have a giant mutant bear in it. But in that first hour, Seltzer has no shortage of great scenes. The chainsaw duel is, of course, the centerpiece of the action until the bear shows up, but before that, our doctor hero is introduced caring for poor Black families living in rat-infested tenements in New York City. The Black mother who called him in to care for her rat-bitten baby tells him her landlord ignored her complaints, and they both bond over their contempt for abusive landlords. And before that, we’re introduced to the doctor’s wife, Maggie (Talia Shire), who’s pregnant and wants to keep it, but her husband wants her to get an abortion, citing the starving children around the world as a reason not to bring another into it (groan). The casual discussion of abortion and abortive procedures not only broadcasts the film’s sociopolitical interests, but it’s also a depressing reminder of how much the U.S. has regressed since.

The film’s first hour only stumbles with the relationship of Robert and Maggie, which is stilted despite Foxworth and Shire’s decent performances, and the introduction of the Indigenous peoples. Assante is woefully miscast as their de facto leader — an Italian-Irish American, Assante feels out of place. (You can discuss abortion and Indigenous rights in a Hollywood film in 1979, but God help you if you cast a Native actor.) Nevertheless, Hawks gets one of the film’s best lines: When he tells Robert that the Natives need the forest to survive, Robert tells him about the claustrophobic tenement houses of New York. It’s an odd point to make — Robert is seemingly implying that poor families stacked on top of one another in the city would love to have even a fraction of the space the Opies have in Maine. “There are people in this world fighting for a single inch of living space,” he says. “Yes,” replies Hawks, “because they fought too late.”

Aside from Assante, Prophecy has assembled a fine cast. Shire was hot off the Godfather films directed by her brother, Francis Ford Coppola, and on loan from Rocky II so she could appear in Prophecy. Compared to the rest of her work, this and 1970’s The Dunwich Horror are the only B-pictures Shire made. Foxworth, on the other hand, had something of a “scream queen” reputation. With a career far less illustrious than Shire’s, he nevertheless was a familiar face in the world of TV serials and horror. He played Dr. Frankenstein on TV in 1973 and fully shifted to being a horror leading man in 1977, when he headlined the films Ants, The Astral Factor, Deathmoon, and Omen II: Damien back to back before starring in Prophecy.

Despite his firm voice, authoritative looks, and heroic stance (he looks like a Body Snatchers-era Donald Sutherland), it’s hard to say he’s good in Prophecy. The most he emotes is when he wrestles a rabid raccoon and then throws it into a fireplace. The rest is mostly running through the woods or coldly delivering lines about the paper mill’s rampant pollution.

Prophecy also stars Richard A. Dysart as the paper mill boss, Isley, though Dysart is best recognized by horror fans as the physician who gets his arms bitten off a few years later in The Thing. The man in the Katahdin suit is Kevin Peter Hall, best known as the Predator. The real jewel of Prophecy, however, is George Clutesi, a Tseshaht artist, actor, and spokesperson for the Canadian First Nations. He plays Hector M’Rai, an Opie elder who believes that the mutant bear is a spirit come to wreak havoc on the land after the paper company polluted it. Clutesi is completely wasted in the film, unfortunately, and in the climax, when the whole cast is on the run from Katahdin, it’s no surprise to see him become a bear chew toy. Clutesi also appeared in a second Jaws rip-off in 1979: the vampire bat horror film Nightwing.

OK, Let’s Talk About The Mutant Bear

All the careful plotting of the first hour goes out the window when the bear shows up. Having Seltzer’s scaffolding in place certainly helps raise the film above the dead-eyed taxidermied Jaws recreation of a cheaper rip-off like Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, but Prophecy still lags behind the propulsive, energetic, and casually flamboyant filmmaking of its smarter older brother. John Frankenheimer is a craftsperson, alright, but he isn’t Steven Spielberg. The bear sequences are more Frankenheimer’s work than Seltzer’s — there are only so many ways one can write a bear attack on the page, and that’s not where Seltzer’s interests lie in Prophecy. So the bear attack sequences are goofy, from its initial attack on a search party in the dark to its assault on a family’s campground. The film is perhaps most memorable for a wild scene in which the bear swats a kid in a sleeping bag into a rock so hard that he’s reduced to a cloud of feathers.

Frankenheimer obviously didn’t care about this film. He built his career on Important movies, not B-pictures. Movies like Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, The Iceman Cometh, and Black Sunday. (We’ve actually covered Prophecy twice already at Film Inquiry — once as part of a “so bad it’s good” series and a second time for a Frankenheimer retrospective.) Unfortunately, I find his Manchurian Candidate to be inane and toothless, and I have no love for him as a filmmaker. If he had pretensions that he was better than this material, he needed to get his head out of his ass and direct a mutant bear movie.

There are glimpses of a better film in there — Frankenheimer’s direction works in the quiet shots of the plane flying into this remote Maine territory, where you watch the plane gliding over the pines. But that’s really more on Leonard Rosenman’s soaring music and Harry Stradling Jr.’s gorgeous cinematography than it is on Frankenheimer. No, the one time Frankenheimer bests his material is in a scene late in the film. The ecological drama had long since given way to killer bear shenanigans, and the cast is hiding in a tunnel under a teepee. The scene is shot in close quarters, with everyone too terrified to make a sound, listening with us, the audience, to find out whether or not the bear is still in their camp. The scene goes on for much longer than it ought to, but that length is just enough that it spills over into being suspenseful.

The bear itself is hardly worth building a film around. Katahdin is a splotchy fake mess devised by Tom Burman and Ellis Burman Jr. It looks fake in the closeups and fake from a distance. In only one shot, when it’s chasing Shire and bobbling maniacally back and forth in the background, it looks menacing.

But then again, I suppose it depends on who you ask — Quentin Tarantino wrote a review of the film for the cinema The New Beverly, and he said, “It’s the bonkers bear monster that makes the movie memorable.” (The emphasis is Tarantino’s — dude loves his italics.) But Tarantino also outright rejects most of the film’s political posturing seemingly because it’s a monster movie, or maybe he thinks it’s too pretentious. He calls it a “stupid ass movie,” but he says he adores Shire’s performance. Tarantino sums up the bear the best, I think, when he says it has “a face like a cheeseless pizza.” If you’re in it for bear monsters, I guess you’ll be disappointed.

Conclusion

Prophecy might not have the coolest monster, but that doesn’t make it a dumb film. It’s refreshing to see a horror movie that has an opinion on anything. Nowadays, “elevated horror” is the hip trend. A movie can’t have a monster unless it’s a ham-fisted metaphor for something. The alien in Nope, Jean Jacket, is a metaphor for spectatorship and spectacle. Michael Myers has been turned into a metaphor for paranoia, grief, trauma, and mob violence in the Halloween remake trilogy.

If there’s any deeper message to modern horror, it’s usually in the subtext, and it usually has to do with ambiguous stuff like grief, loss, aging, or trauma rather than political issues. So when the characters just talk about abortion out in the open, or when Foxworth lectures us on corporate greed and industrial pollution, it’s refreshing. Prophecy is a good old-fashioned horror movie with its head in the right place and a goofy-looking killer bear everywhere else, and it has the good sense to end as soon as the bear bites it.

Prophecy is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, Fubo TV, Paramount+, and MGM+.

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