Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Leoni Haney Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Sam Panico The film starts with a gorgeous shot of lights bouncing off a river as a rescue team search for two lost men, only to be murdered by some unseen force. Cut to the stark light of day and we have a horrifyingly beautiful composition of their decimated corpses in the sun.Cut to Dr. Robert Verne, working as a doctor in the tenements of the city, giving kids medical care. This scene is rife with that feeling 1979 gave you, that we were living in the end of the world. Verne feels like he isn't making any difference, especially after hearing how the rats keep biting the kids. That's why he decides to take a job with the Environmental Protection Agency (again, very 70s as is Foxworth's reddish white dude fro and full beard. Sex symbols were…different at the time), which means heading up to a logging town in Maine and solving a dispute between the loggers and Native Americans (Wow, again, this movie is just rife with issues that today's now generation is ready to tackle!).Maggie, Verne's wife, comes along. She's pregnant but since he has no interest in kids, she is planning on just having an abortion (Do I need another parenthesis to shout out the 70s issues? Yes, I do.) and not telling him. We meet Travis, his kids Paul and Kathleen and paper mill director Bethel Isely.Isely blames the missing rescue team and loggers on the Opies, or Original People (Native Americans). The accused have their own suspect: Katahdin, the spirit of the forest. We barely have time to process that before the Opies block our main characters path, leading to a battle between lumberjack Kelso and Opie leader John Hawks that ends with Hawks facing a chainsaw vasectomy. Cooler heads prevail, but Verne and Maggie are aghast at the violence in the woods.What follows is a slow burn toward our big monster reveal, which was a huge secret at the time, as the film had tight security, barring even studio personnel from the set. Crew and actors had to sign NDAs that they would not reveal any elements of the story under any circumstances. A retired CIA agency supervised the whole shoot, only allow one camera for the official still photographer.There's a giant salmon snacking on a duck. An insane raccoon that attacks Verne. A gigantic tadpole. And of course, a litany of stillbirths, birth defects and people going crazy. Verne thinks mercury is the culprit, but it's too late to save that lovely Nelson family we met earlier, who are attacked by Katahdin, who is revealed to be a female mutant bear that swats Paul into the rocks, killing him.Read more at bandsaboutmovies.com/2017/06/30/prophecy-1979/

A.N. This film could have been much scarier and some segments hinted at its potential. But I didn't find myself bored. I'd say about 30% of the scenes (in isolation) were quite good but got tainted by weaker scenes throughout. The acting was average.I liked the all-too-common message of corrupt polluters looking the other way, even though the outcome was exaggerated vs. real life. Methyl Mercury can cause deformities but probably not gigantic creatures. The bulbous Katahdin "bear" was possibly meant to be supernatural, though. It's predictable that a number of people disliked this movie because of its ecological tone, and I wish we could ship them to another planet to ruin in isolation.I was inspired to write this review to point out one of the biggest flaws: If you see a mangled baby something-or-other (bear?) with sharp teeth and claws, you don't stuff it inside your jacket and care for it like a puppy! The woman found this out toward the end when it started gnawing on her neck, but that was oddly downplayed. I didn't understand the urgency of keeping it alive since the corpse would have sufficed, unless they thought the lumbermen might have taken it for a hoax.Anyhow, this movie is worth watching but could have been more polished and realistic.

Alien_Zombie This film had the potential to be a rare echo-horror that actually tackled the subject of men tempering with nature. It was apparently inspired by a real environmental disaster in Japan and since it was directed by John Frankenheimmer, I was genuinely intrigued to check out this film that I had been dismissing for so long mainly because of the infamous exploding sleeping bag scene.It starts out nicely with a violent sequence that proceeds to set up the main characters and plot; Native Americans are demonstrating against loggers working on a paper mill and taking away their land. The protagonist is a doctor who is called to the affair as an adviser and soon finds out that the plant is poisoning the water, the fish and the people who live of the land. To make matters worse there's something in the woods feeding on loggers and campers.Now, I know this is a creature feature and the monster deserves a fair amount of screen time. It is kept in wraps throughout the film, making up for some genuinely suspenseful scenes. At first it's a mere side effect of the much bigger tragedy that the land and people are suffering. But by the end it takes over the movie, turning it into a gore fest and depriving it of its original atmosphere. All the subplots are dropped, characters vanished and the movie abruptly ends.All in all, as far as echo-horror goes this is one of the most decent and fans of b movies will certainly be entertained. More stuff to look out for is the gorgeous Victoria Racimo, a young Armand Assante, those adorable mutated bear cubs and of course, the exploding sleeping bag scene.

Leofwine_draca Now this is what a monster movie should be like: an interesting story that doesn't rely on the creature to keep things moving along; realism wherever possible; a decent cast of B-movie types who you can play "who's gonna die next?" with.Much of the success of PROPHECY lies in the presence of director John Frankenheimer, who brings a sheen of professionalism to the proceedings that many other minor monster flick directors can't hope to equal. This is a film which inhabits the same ecological disaster type territory as LONG WEEKEND and FROGS, and proves to be just as entertaining: the story of a mutated bear-creature rampaging in the woods as a result of industrial pollution is a good one, and PROPHECY never disappoints.Along with the interesting story, this film benefits from a strong leading cast who bring life to what could be otherwise rote characters. Robert Foxworth is the bearded, wild-haired leading man, but Talia Shire (riding high from the success of ROCKY) is of the most interest, facing a dilemma that is irritatingly never resolved. Armand Assante plays perhaps the world's most unlikely Native American and Richard Dysart bags the great role of the company man responsible for the pollution.The monster effects are great – I'll forever take prosthetic and model effects work over CGI – and the horror scenes ultra effective, with the bit with the boy in the sleeping bag an example of 'one seen, never forgotten'. The most chilling thing, though, is is the implication of the environmental pollution, as evinced by the film's coda, with far more disturbing implications than an in-your-face out of control rampaging bear mutant.