The Dunk Tank: The Prophecy

There’s a lot to like about The Prophecy, Gregory Widen’s surprisingly influential 1995 horror fantasy about disaffected angels squabbling over the fate of mankind. Christopher Walken’s performance as the archangel Gabriel is a wonderful little oddity, birdlike and bemused. The film’s practical effects are frequently sensational, from gnarly burn makeup to ghastly images of thrashing angels impaled on stakes. There’s even a matte painting thrown in to spice up a fantasy vision sequence toward the start of the third act. You can see the film’s aesthetic echoed in movies like Constantine, its themes in Dogma, its post-Biblical mythologizing and desaturated dream sequences in HBO’s short-lived Carnivale, but beneath its compelling imagery and interesting acting choices is a lumpen, inert script not even Eleas Koteas and Virginia Madsen, two pillars of genre filmmaking, can make much out of.

Aside from its tediously convoluted plot, which is set uncomfortably against a more or less decorative backdrop of indigenous people, The Prophecy’s real problem is its leads. We open on Thomas’s (Koteas) failed ordination as a priest, a gripping scene in which a literal Doubting Thomas experiences the death of his faith in the throes of an ecstatic vision, then cut forward to Thomas working as a cop. It’s a natural enough progression, but after that first moment we never really learn much of anything about Thomas or see him change as a person again. He slides right into accepting the secret gospels recovered from the body of an angel and then bam, it’s off to the races. Virginia Madsen is likewise left flailing as a reservation teacher, a troubling white savior role the film circles without engaging. There’s no meat to any of it, and in spite of their considerable charisma and genre chops, the two just can’t sell the fat load of nothing Widen saddles them with.

To be clear, The Prophecy is the best movie I’ve watched as part of this fundraiser by a country mile, which is to say it’s merely a mess. There’s something dispiriting about watching its parts fail to engage with one another, its various cogs spinning independently until their momentum winds down and all that’s left is Viggo Mortensen’s mind-bendingly sexy Lucifer dragging the film across the finish line with a nonsensical plot about how no one but him is allowed to be evil. At least with Battlefield Earth or Mac and Me there’s no chance of salvaging anything worth watching from the sucking morass of their awfulness, but The Prophecy has just enough going for it to lure you into the quicksand of watching it attentively.