ROBERT FOXWORTH BEARS JOHN FRANKENHEIMER'S 'PROPHECY'

Title: PROPHECY Year: 1979 Rating: ***1/2

At one point, when idealistic city doctor Robert Foxworthy and quiet musician wife Taila Shire are in the Oregon woods investigating strange happenings around a Native American community, we cut to an immense paper-mill with formidable music that would usually prelude a march of Nazi soldiers, or their mustached leader...

Meanwhile polite antagonist Richard Dysart, a few years before being part of a gory monstrous takeover in THE THING, is subtly covering things up: overall making the liberal-minded eco-horror PROPHECY far more ambiguous than if it were made today (or in the last thirty-years)...

Mia Bendixsen in PROPHECY

Promoted by a movie-trailer without the usual ensemble of scenes, but an entire pivotal sequence where a camping-out family's killed by an unseen menace... the young son slammed against a rock as his sleeping bad explodes into feathers...

Basically your standard body-count slasher kind of thing... but PROPHECY is more an investigative mystery where hit/miss director John Frankenheimer has some creative shots and builds tension semi-aptly...

Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire in PROPHECY

And the actors... especially married leads Foxworthy and Shire... are more intensely focused on the enigmatic, perpetually-unfolding plot than the somewhat heavy-handed, preachy theme behind it... curbing Armand Assante's overly-melodramatic turn as a beguiled Indian...

Leading to the famous (or rather infamous) "mutant bear on a rampage" finale that reminds the audience this is a bonafide monster movie albeit far superior in the build-up than what it's clumsily narrowed into.

Mutant Bear in PROPHECY

Robert Foxworth in PROPHECY

Robert Foxworth in PROPHECY with Taila Shire and Richard Dysart

Robert Foxworth and Victoria Racimo (later in Falcon Crest) in PROPHECY with Armand Assante

From John Frankenheimer's PROPHECY