The monster movie post.
The six-film Animal Apocalypses series continues with film #2, 1979’s Prophecy, directed, at a low point in his career, by the legendary John Frankenheimer. (19 years later he’d give us Ronin, so it’s all good.) I went way longer than I probably needed to, but damn this film frustrates me.
Throughout Prophecy are a number of moments that, for a lack of a better term, I’d call microaggressions, moments where an uglier intentions reveal themselves. We’re supposed to see Verne as a tireless crusader against injustice when we meet him in a D.C. ghetto, treating a Black baby for rat bites and threatening the absent landlord. However, when Verne and his wife Maggie (Shire) arrive in beautiful, forested Maine, he says, “I’d forgotten the world could look like this.” After an opening sequence that contrasts the serene concert hall with a noisy and inconvenient protest and the ghetto crowded with Black folks that the camera treats with suspicion, it’s not hard to read this as an anti-urban broadside. Implied questions hang in the air: does Verne think this is a place that Black people should escape to from the stifling ghetto? Or is it beautiful because there are no Black people there? Shortly after they land, the two witness a confrontation between the mill’s goons and the Indigenous tribe that turns violent. An absurd axe/chainsaw fight between Hawks and a goon ends with the goon threatening to decapitate Hawks. Does Verne, explicitly hired to mediate between these two groups, quite literally landing in the center of the conflict, does he even do the bare minimum and say, Hey maybe threatening to chainsaw a dude’s head off, in front of me and my wife and everyone else, isn’t the way to go? No, he lambastes Hawks for his resistance and the incident is never mentioned again. Immediately after this, immediately after this, what does Verne do? He goes fishing. This is his vacation.
For the game material, no surprises here: it’s the mutant bear at the heart of the film, sometimes called Katahdin, rendered in Cypher System format. I took a few liberties, as I always do.
NEXT TIME, ON AGAINST THE ‘70S:
