What a confused muddle of a film! What a waste of time! I would say that this film was a waste of money too, except obviously they did not spend much money on it. Presumably, in 1995 actors like Viggo Mortensen and Christopher Walken could be had without producers digging too deeply into their pockets. No need to shoot in a fancy Hollywood studio either. Pick some washed up town in the west with an abandoned copper mine, and a dilapidated school that could probably be rented for a couple hundred bucks. Viola! A set! Fill the rest of the movie with actors and actresses who rarely go beyond television like Amanda Plummer and Virginia Madsen. I doubt they paid them more than union scales.
Next, keep your fingers crossed. Hope that more than twenty years after The Exorcist was released that there will still be enough of a market for people being possessed by spirits to line your investors’ pockets. Come to think of it, The Exorcist was pretty dreadful too but at least it was novel. The Prophecy though is not the least bit scary, though at times it is a wee bit gross. You may find yourself looking at your watch and asking yourself, “Is it over yet?” I know I did.
If however like my wife and I you are connoisseurs of bad movies, this is one may be worth renting, although one viewing should be enough. Here is the plot as best I can figure out. When God distanced himself from Lucifer and his group of dark angels, Lucifer got really pissed. He has been working hard since to get the big guy’s attention. What he needs to get God’s attention is a soul belonging to a recently deceased citizen of this washed up town. It inhabits the body of an officer who while fighting in the Korean War also engaged in a little harmless cannibalism. Apparently, to exchange a soul you have to do it through the mouth. The Angel Simon (Eric Stoltz) has the duty to retrieve the soul from the body of this ex-cannibal, with the help of his wild-eyed sidekick Jerry (Adam Goldberg) who apparently is already dead, sort of.
Simon for some reason is one of the good angels. In trying to keep the soul away from the Angel Gabriel (Walken), whom I always assumed was one of the good angels, he has to redeposit into the body of another living person. He picks a young girl named Mary (a virtual no-name actress named Moriah ‘Shining Dove’ Snyder). She is in turn a pupil of the very radiant and hot (in a girl next door kind of way) Katherine Henley (Virginia Madsen). Henley teaches to a diminished set of students of all ages in this washed up copper mining town. Most of the classrooms are boarded up, but some of the students like to hang out during recess in a creepy classroom upstairs. It is here that Mary stumbles upon Simon.
Mary quickly discovers that having the soul of an evil cannibal does not agree with her. She quickly gets sick and is taken back to the reservation where she is attended to by her Indian grandmother. Detective Thomas Daggett (Elias Koteas) has the dubious privilege of figuring out what is going on. It helps to move the plot along that Detective Daggett at one point nearly became a priest, and only left because while he was about to be ordained he saw visions of dark angels.
At least the angels in this movie are not one-dimensional. They have a perverse sense of humor, which must have evolved from being so long out of God’s favor. That is likely why Walken was hired for his role as Gabriel. Lucifer (Viggo Mortensen) does not show up until near the end of the movie. In what is supposed to be a climactic scene, but which is not the least bit scary, the bad angels converge at a place where an Indian shaman is trying to extract the evil soul from the body of poor, innocent Mary. She never pukes like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, but she does spit out stuff from time to time. That will have to do.
When the angels show up, the movie often feels more campy than serious. The movie’s main problem is that you simply do not care about any of the characters. We might have felt sorry for poor little Mary if we actually learned enough about the girl to care about her. We do not. The characters are more cardboard than real so it is hard to give a damn about any of them.
Oddly enough, the movie must have done well enough because The Prophecy 2 was released in 1998 and Mary reappears in The Prophecy 3: The Ascent. I have to assume that enough moviegoers enjoyed Walken’s humorous approach toward playing Lucifer to want to see him in the role again. That mystifies me because he was not that good in the original. I have to assume the original was so cheap to make that sequels were not risky.
I wish I had been prophetic enough to warn you away from this movie. If your taste in bad movies goes toward the campy kind, see it. Otherwise, give it wide berth.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:17pm
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Mark |
The Arts |
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While I wait for inspiration to blog on more compelling topics, I can at least do the public a service by urging you to stay away from two spectacularly bad movies. Remember: you have been warned.
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
I recently blogged about the movie To Wong Fu: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995). This was a surprisingly amusing and well-done movie about three drag queens trying to drive cross-country to compete in a national drag queen contest. A year before this movie came out another Australian movie, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, also starring three drag queens on an adventure was foisted on the public. I doubt it was widely seen in the United States, thank goodness. In the case of this film, Priscilla is not one of the drag queens, but the name of a beat up bus that Bernadette, Mitzi and Felicia take across the Australian desert for a gig the city of Alice Springs in Australia’s remote Northern Territory.
If you were ever wondering what it would be like for Hugo Weaving (best known for his portrayal of Agent Smith in the three Matrix movies) to play a drag queen, this movie will satisfy your curiosity. Let me save you the trouble though and tell you: ridiculous. I would hasten to add that he undoubtedly makes the worst drag queen on the screen, except he is assisted by two other drag queens, one played by Terrance Stamp, who is even worse. The only drag queen that is passable in this movie is Felicia, played by Guy Pearce.
While Sydney apparently can tolerate drag queens, the folks in the heartland are a predictable bunch of homophobes. The exception may be a group of Aborigines they encounter in the latter half of the film. I like to think that these outbackers are not so much homophobes as people who cannot stand seeing three drag queens do such a miserable job of portraying drag queens. In To Wong Fu: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, at least these gals looked like ladies. These three do not come close and Bernadette and Mitzi are frankly remarkably ugly drag queens. As in To Wong Fu: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, their vehicle breaks down in an inconvenient spot and they have to try to get by with the locals. Since they break down literally in the middle of nowhere, mostly this mean a lot of lizards. They eventually do make it to Alice Springs where we discover Mitzi has a wife and a son.
I am amazed we made it through the movie. I will confess that the sight of Felicia, propped on top of the bus as it moves through the desert, with a train tens of feet long flowing in the desert wind, was a spectacularly strange site and one my burning eyes would like to purge from my memory, but cannot. This is one drag queen movie (and there are not many) to not come within a dozen clicks of. Stay away!
Fool’s Gold (2008)
The airlines are truly in hard times when they put dreck like Fool’s Gold (2008) on as “entertainment” on a three and a half hour flight from Washington Dulles International Airport to Denver International Airport, which was where I saw it. Tess (Kate Hudson) is married to Benjamin (Matthew McConaughey), a walking calamity of a husband who within the first five minutes of the movie manages to sink his wife’s boat while he explores underwater for treasure off the Bahamas. Apparently, Benjamin has only a few talents. One of them is making love and the other is finding (and ultimately losing) deep-sea treasure.
They end up getting divorced but fate of course keeps them together because while the boat sank Benjamin just happens to find a piece of treasure that suggests he and his now ex wife can find dozens of treasure chests hidden in or around the Bahaman island. To make ends meet, Tess works on a yacht serving food to a multimillionaire named Nigel played by Donald Sutherland. Nigel is the unfortunate father of an extremely attractive Valley Girl named Gemma (Alexis Dziena), who manages to be more annoying than McConaughey, which admittedly is a hard act to follow. Naturally, Benjamin, through many implausible scenarios, manages to convince Nigel to facilitate his treasure hunt.
The overacting and shallow stereotypes in this movie are excruciatingly difficult to endure. I know women swoon over McConaughey, but he is one of these pretty boy actors who basically cannot act. Here he serves merely to put eye candy on the screen for the women. This movie allows him to showcase all his stereotypes in all their gratuitous excessiveness. Perhaps he did “act” in the sense that he fit his stereotype to a tee. All the over the top acting, screaming and high pitched voices, as well as the transparent plot, made getting through it a real challenge. However, my flight was so long and so boring that I had little alternative. So I have watched it so you do not have to. Poor Donald Sutherland looks like he would rather be having a root canal. Frankly, I would have too. I hope he was paid well. The only fool’s gold here are the fools who pay to see this tripe. Don’t you be one of them. There are bad movies worth seeing for their badness. This is not one of them. It just reeks of mediocrity. If it arrives on HBO, change the channel. I don’t care how muscled McConaughey is or how much you may think Kate Hudson is cute and charming. Life is too short to squander it with trash like this. Yech.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:48pm
Posted by
Mark |
The Arts |
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