Review: The Prophecy (1995)

When I saw The Prophecy lurking in my Netflix selection, I remembered back to the days when I first watched this film.  It was damn near half my life ago, but I do recall liking it somewhat.  It may have been because of the presence of Christopher Walken (who I seem to have a fetish for…) or it may have been because it had a different formula than the standard horror flick.  So I decided to head back and revisit The Prophecy and see what came of it.

The story follows a detective by the name of Dagget.  He was once on the way to becoming a priest but, due to a crazy vision from heaven, never quite made it.  He ended up becoming a cop instead.  He gets drawn into a war between competing groups of angels.  Not angels vs. demons, mind you, but angels vs. angels.  As it turns out, there are some missing chapters from the Bible and they talk about a thousands-of-years-old war.

Enter a couple of the main angels.  There’s Simon and his rival, Gabriel (played by Walken).  Both of them are trying to find a “dark soul.”  Simon wants to keep it hidden while Gabriel wants to use it as a weapon to put angels back in God’s favor while kicking humans to the curb.  Angel fights ensue.  Simon doesn't last long, so the rest of the movie is Gabriel trying to figure out where the soul ended up and Dagget trying to protect the little girl that became the unwilling vessel.  In the end, Lucifer himself makes an appearance and helps to thwart Gabriel, upset at the idea that the war might end with there being two hells instead of just his hell.

The premise of the film is interesting enough and unique for its time.  The actors do a good job (even the perpetually hammy Walken) and the story is deep enough to be compelling.  It’s an easy movie to watch, steadily taking you from one scene to the next and keeping you around until the end.  All-in-all, I enjoyed it quite a bit, despite the horrible rating of 40 percent that it was given at Rotten Tomatoes (it did, however, receive a more generous 68 percent from the non-critics).

A few minor problems stand in the way of The Prophecy being a great horror film.  First and foremost, a couple of the action scenes hit so far in the cliché red-zone that they almost seem to come out of a different film.  Corny lines, bad stunts and perfectly timed executions leave you rolling your eyes.  There’s also the Walken himself, giving a movie that had a decent script a B-movie feel.  I love ya Chris, and most of the job you do is excellent, but even horror films need consistantly good acting sometimes.

I highly recommend The Prophecy for those that enjoy a horror flick that requires a bit more thinking.  The many, MANY sequels to the film… I don’t recommend so much.  The first movie was a concise tale that needed no extrapolation and the writers/directors for the addition films are not the originals, so there’s really no point.

Prophecy Walken photo courtesy of sodahead.com