A giant logging and paper mill organisation are felling trees at an industrial almost apocalyptic rate and are also pumping something nasty into the waters around their factory. Watch the scene where we are introduced to the scale of the operation as the music swells, as written by Leonard Rosenman in a Wagnerian fashion, and the camera sweeps up over a wide river jammed tightly with felled floating logs. Talk about your Dark Satanic Mills, this place is Mordor in the making. The locals are suffering badly, they are sick, stagger and fall down. exhibiting the kind of drunken characteristics that lead to their stereotyping as drunken natives. A Doctor Verne and his wife Maggie are sent to make an enviromental study that might produce a case for halting the deforestation and pollution but there are many hurdles to be over come. Not least being the resistance from the logging company and its manager, who turns a blind eye to the many evils the mass felling of trees obscures. The story takes place along the banks of the Androscoggin River, a location of staggering beauty with a lively river and a dense forest that seems to rise and fall along the broken spine of a mountain.
The movie is so well shot and makes the most of the most ominous forest locations on screen. The same sort of atmosphere that surrounds the small town of Twin Peaks with its mass of Douglas Firs swaying hauntingly in a wind with origins not of this world. In a forest that size you could believe in the existence of elder Indian spirits or even Big Foot.
There is certainly something large roaming this forest with claws and teeth to match. John Frankenheimer directed this movie and managed to draw great performances from his tight cast which included Robert Foxworth, Talia Shire and Armand Assante. The film takes us from the heart of a rat infested ghetto in the bowels of New York tenements and back out into the wilds in the blink of an eye. "Rats gotta live too" says a corrupt and heartless tenement landlord when confronted by the mother of a child who has been subjected to rat bites. Actually they do,I suppose, but not on a diet of human children. Prophecy is a monster movie, to be sure, but it is a well crafted one with very real performances from all involved. Talia shire shines as Maggie, the mother to be who learns too late the terrible cost to be paid for us allowing the world we live on to be poisoned. While Armand Assante, youthful and blindingly handsome, radiates noble gravitas. Robert Foxworth plays a career best as the troubled doctor who desperately seeks a solution to a problem he knows the whole world shares in but also is a man who's determination to solve the problems of the wider world blinds him to the problems closer to home.There are even a few memorable jump scares and action scenes specially during a nerve wracking night time journey through the forest where monsters dwell.
Dark forests late on a windy night. They are a stage for the stuff of nightmares.
