Franchises: The Prophecy. The Prophecy (1995)

Thinking back, I thought I might've first learned of this franchise from The Horror Movie Survival Guide but, looking through it again, while it did have an entry on Prophecy, the 70's movie about the mutated bear, it didn't have one on Gabriel, nor did it even mention this series at all. And now that I really think hard about it, I knew of it before I bought that book, likely because I'd seen the DVDs for some of them here and there (including at the CVS in Monteagle, which did sell movies at one time). I didn't know much about them, other than they starred Christopher Walken as the villain, but I knew enough to realize that, despite the title, the movie they mentioned in that book was something totally different. I also saw a little bit of the first one on Sci-Fi Channel one night, specifically the scene where Gabriel is talking to the kids on the school's steps, but I didn't stick around beyond that because, truth be told, this franchise wasn't one that ever really interested me, as much as I do enjoy watching Walken. Then, in October of 2014, I was on vacation down near Orange Beach and visited a mall in Pensacola that had both a Best Buy and an FYE. It was the week leading up to Halloween, and since I had a lot money to burn, I was on a horror Blu-Ray shopping spree. At the Best Buy, I found a two-disc set of all five of The Prophecy movies for very cheap and I figured, "Why not?", feeling that, if nothing else, they would make for nice material on this blog some day. So, ten years later, that's what we've arrived to, as I don't really love any of these movies. I don't hate them, even if some of the direct-to-video sequels aren't the best, and in the first three, Walken is entertaining to watch as Gabriel, but they're not movies I see myself watching over and over again. While this first one is certainly the best and has a lot going for it, given how it has the highest production value of them all, despite still being a fairly low budget movie in and of itself, as well as a pretty awesome cast, some cool visuals, and a good music score, in the end, I find it to be just okay.

Just as he's about to be ordained as a Catholic priest, Thomas Dagget has a breakdown over horrific visions he's been having of angels killing each other, and he loses his faith; several years later, he now works as an LAPD detective. When he returns to his apartment one day, he finds a mysterious man waiting for him, one who claims to know what he saw and why he lost his faith. After asking him some cryptic questions about what he now believes, the man leaves. Unbeknownst to Thomas, he's actually an angel named Simon. Another angel arrives on Earth shortly afterward, tracks Simon down, and attacks him in his apartment, but Simon manages to kill him. Thomas is called to the site where the body is found and then investigates Simon's now abandoned apartment, where he finds a copy of the Chimney Rock Republican, the local paper for a small town in Arizona, with a specific obituary circled, as well as a thesis Thomas himself once wrote about angels and religious scriptures. Simon makes his way to Chimney Rock and, finding the body of Korean War veteran Colonel Arnold Hawthorne in a church, awaiting burial, removes his lingering soul. Meanwhile, Thomas meets with Joseph, the medical examiner, and learns that the body never had any eyes, is a hermaphrodite, has no signs of bone growth, and has the same blood chemistry as an aborted fetus. Joseph also shows Thomas an ancient, hand-written Bible that they found in the man's coat, one which, on the inside of the front cover, has a symbol identical to a scar on his neck. Looking through it, Thomas finds it has an extra chapter of the Book of Revelations and translates the scripture, which tells of a second war in Heaven, one between angels loyal to Saint Michael the Archangel and others who hate the idea of God lifting mankind above them. The symbol corresponds to an angel known as Uziel, a lieutenant to Gabriel, the other Archangel. Gabriel himself soon arrives on Earth and begins searching for Simon, as well as Col. Hawthorne's dark soul, which will tip the scale of the war for whichever side possesses it. Simon, however, has hidden it in a very unexpected place.

The Prophecy is the one and only film directed by Gregory Widen (possibly because it only did okay at the box-office), who's mainly known as a screenwriter. At the time, his career was on an upward trajectory, with his first credit being as a writer on Highlander, which he'd written the original script for as a class assignment at UCLA, and then, most successfully, on Backdraft. Around the same time as The Prophecy, he also wrote and directed an episode of Tales from the Crypt (his only other directing credit), and went on to create the television series, Rescue 77, but on the whole, he's kind of failed to live up to early promise. It's a shame because he did show some directing talent and potential here. He's since been a producer on the first two Prophecy sequels, and also wrote the not so well-liked Backdraft 2, so his filmography is very hit-and-miss, to say the least.

The film has a rather stacked cast, far beyond just Christopher Walken. Our nominal lead, Thomas Dagget, is played by Elias Koteas, a performance that the man himself felt had a lot of potential but blames himself for squandering. While Thomas is far from the most effective protagonist in a horror film, I think it has less to do with Koteas' performance than how he's just one part of a big ensemble. A former Catholic seminary student who had a complete mental breakdown just as he was about to be ordained as a priest, due to horrific visions of angels killing each other, Thomas now works as an LAPD detective, and is still troubled by his past. Following his meeting with the angel, Simon, who asks him questions about his faith that he can't answer, he finds himself pulled into a bizarre murder mystery that leads him to a centuries-old Bible containing a chapter in the Book of Revelations not found anywhere else. In translating it, he learns of a second war in Heaven, started by angels who hated that God gave humans souls and raised them above all others, as well as a prophecy about a particularly dark soul that will be used as a weapon to turn the tide. He also comes upon a symbol corresponding with a scar on the murder victim's body, making him realize it might be an angel named Uziel. After the body is destroyed by Gabriel, Thomas travels to the small Arizona town of Chimney Rock, as he'd found a copy of its local paper at the crime scene. By the time he gets there, he learns that the body of the recently deceased Col. Arnold Hawthorne, whose obituary was circled in that paper, has been dug up by persons unknown, and that a "wino" burned himself up at the local school. Meeting with the school's sole teacher, Katharine, he then learns that one of the students, Mary, talked with the "wino," and is now home sick. Searching Hawthorne's old home, Thomas discovers that, despite his reputation as a war hero, the colonel had been investigated for war crimes, and finds grisly evidence proving it was true.

That's a big issue with Thomas: he spends much of the first two acts investigating and learning what we already know, as we see the fight between Simon and Uziel that results in the latter's death, Gabriel destroying the corpse, Gabriel and his servant, Jerry, digging up Hawthorne's grave, and Gabriel killing Simon when he refuses to reveal where he's hidden the colonel's soul. And though we didn't know the details at first, we could also deduce that Hawthorne was a really bad man considering the prophecy and

what Gabriel says about him before he finds the soul is missing from the body. After learning of Hawthorne's atrocities, Thomas has his first encounter with Gabriel in a church, one that really unnerves the detective, as he says things that suggest he's not just a quirky guy, as he initially appears to be. Thomas then finally goes and sees Mary, trying to get her to tell the "secret" that Simon asked her to keep for him, only for her to be momentarily possessed by Hawthorne and say some truly horrific things. That all but

confirms what's going for him, and when he and Katharine investigate an abandoned mine where she says she saw the car Gabriel drove off in, they find the walls covered in angelic script and see a horrific vision of the war in Heaven, with hundreds of angels impaled on stakes and spears. Now knowing that Gabriel is an angel, they rush back to Mary's home, only to find him there, attempting to extract Hawthorne's soul from the girl. Thomas tries to stop Gabriel, but proves to be powerless against him,

although he does manage to kill Jerry. Katharine, however, manages to momentarily incapacitate Gabriel, and they take Mary to Old Woman View, a sacred site for her Native American clan, for an exorcism ritual. There, both Thomas and Katharine have a meaningful but relatively small part in stopping Gabriel. Thomas, in fact, even tries to reason with him, seeing a little bit of himself in the Archangel's disillusionment with God, but ultimately has to resort to force.

Katharine, played by Virginia Madsen, who'd just been in Candyman, is the one teacher at Chimney Rock's elementary school and is very close to the kids, particularly the young Native American girl, Mary. Naturally, she's concerned when she finds Mary spending time with Simon in an old storage area in the school, but also has some compassion for him, thinking he's a wayward drunk looking for a place to stay. She offers to call the police, saying they can help him, but he convinces her to simply leave. Then, she has to deal with not only Mary suddenly becoming ill but Simon being found burned to ashes the next day. When she first meets Thomas Dagget, Katharine answers his questions about Simon and Col. Hawthorne, but seems a bit leery as to what his interest in them are. After she first meets Gabriel when she finds him at the school, talking with the kids, she's not too happy to see Thomas at Mary's home, telling her that she doesn't have to tell him anything. Shocked when Mary suddenly starts talking about killing Chinese, and using racist terms in doing so, she asks Thomas to tell her the truth about what's going on. Not sure what he means when he tells her just how frightening an angel can be, she tells him about Gabriel and Jerry, then shows Thomas the abandoned copper mine where she saw their car earlier. There, the two of them get all the proof they need about what's going on, and rush back to Mary's to find Gabriel attempting to remove Hawthorne's soul from her, in a manner that would brutally kill her. Though she still gets tossed around, Katharine actually puts up a better fight against him than Thomas, even managing to momentarily stop him by accidentally shooting a propane tank and blowing up Mary's trailer behind him. The two of them then take Mary to Old Woman View, and that night, Katharine is visited by none other than Lucifer himself. He tells her of Gabriel's plan to tip the scale of the war in Heaven in his favor and offers his assistance in stopping him, for his own reasons. During the climax, both Thomas and Katharine manage to slow Gabriel down, the latter shooting him and nearly getting her skull crushed for the effort, while Thomas beats him repeatedly with a tire iron. But, in the end, Lucifer is the one who defeats the Archangel. However, he then tries to make Thomas and Katharine "come home" with him, but Thomas, having regained his faith, refuses, as does Katharine.

Mary (Moriah "Shining Dove" Snyder), the young Native American girl in Chimney Rock, is introduced as a very precocious kid with a really close relationship to Katharine. Following her introduction at a recital, Mary, after Katharine tells her there's one piece of cake left that she'll have to race her for, tricks her into looking out into the dark, saying there's something there, then quickly runs back inside for a head-start. Later, she and her friends are playing hide-and-seek in a closed off storage area in the school, when she finds Simon sleeping there. Though initially startled by the sight of him, she befriends him and, as he asks, doesn't tell Katharine that he's there; she even goes as far as to bring him some food. After Katharine does find Simon, and Mary with him, she makes Mary leave, only for her to later sneak back in immediately afterward. Simon then places Col. Hawthorne's soul into her, asking her to keep, "The biggest secret ever." Once the soul is in her, Mary becomes very ill and has to stay home from school at her trailer, where she lives with her grandmother. But she intends on keeping the secret, even when Katharine and Thomas, the latter of whom claims to be Simon's friend, ask her what it is. She also starts to become sporadically possessed by Hawthorne, at one pointing talking about what it's like to cut off a "Chinaman's" head, as well as draw violent depictions of battle and murder, and have dreams involving the colonel. During the third act, she becomes Gabriel's target (and manages to shoot him twice when he tries to take the soul out of her), while Thomas and Katharine take her to Old Woman View so Hawthorne's spirit can be exorcised from her.

Along with Gabriel, the other recurring character in the first three Prophecy movies (as well as in the fourth one, via an internet exchange with the protagonist there) is the small supporting role of Joseph (Steve Hytner), the coroner who's friends with Thomas. When he comes in to learn everything there is to know about Uziel's body, Joseph tells him what's strange about it in an off-handed, quirky, slightly jittery manner. When he tells Thomas that the body is a hermaphrodite, he adds, "Oh!", before explaining, "He's got both male and female sex organs... You can be impotent and frigid all at the same time. They don't normally work." Then, when he shows Thomas the Bible that Uziel had on him, and Thomas notes it has a chapter in the Book of Revelations that shouldn't exist, Joseph comments, "Well, maybe this is the Teacher's Edition." He agrees to let Thomas borrow the Bible, and agrees not to do anything with the body just yet. He later tells Thomas that carbon-dating has proven the Bible is actually thousands of years old and Thomas, in turn, tells him of his findings from translating the text. At first, Joseph doesn't take it seriously, including when Thomas suggests that the dead man could be an angel. But when Gabriel destroys Uziel's body, and Thomas opts to go to Chimney Rock, Joseph encourages him to discover the truth, then call and tell him that he's not crazy.

The concept that makes both this series both interesting and fairly controversial to devout Christians is how depicts angels in a much more complex and less overly positive light than usual. Even the most benevolent one here, Eric Stoltz's Simon, is depicted less as a hero and more as a weary, tired entity who wishes this second war of Heaven would end, opening the movie with, "I remember the first war. The way the sky burned. The faces of angels destroyed. I saw a third of Heaven's legion banished, and the creation of Hell. I stood with my brothers and watched Lucifer fall. But now, my brothers are not brothers, and we have come here, where we are mortal, to steal a dark soul, not yet Lucifer's, to serve our cause. I have always obeyed, but I never thought the war would happen again." When he suddenly appears in Thomas' apartment, he sympathizes with his loss of faith, saying, "Everything used to be much simpler, didn't it?... Everyone thinks they know what Heaven is like, but Heaven isn't Heaven anymore," and adds that he knows why he lost his faith. Asking if he still has any at all, and not getting a straight answer, Simon leaves. After being hunted down and attacked by Uziel, whom he kills during a brief fight, he heads to Chimney Rock, having located the dark soul mentioned in the prophecy as being the tipping point for the war. Taking it from the body of Colonel Hawthorne before he's buried, Simon becomes ill from carrying it and hides out in the local elementary school, where he meets and befriends Mary. Knowing Gabriel will come for the soul, and wanting to simply end the war rather than have one side destroy the other, he places the soul in Mary, a rather dickish move, as it makes the poor kid sick, possessed, and a target for Gabriel later on. When Gabriel does track him down, Simon tries to reason with him, given how close they used to be, but there's no dissuading him, and he even offers Simon a place at his side. Simon simply asks, "Oh, Gabriel. When was it that you lost your grace?", then adds, "I'd like to help you, old friend, but I can't. I'm not sure who's right, who's wrong, but it doesn't matter. Sometimes, you just have to do what you're told. That's who we are." Gabriel proceeds to torture Simon, bringing him close to death but stopping just shy of it, but he still refuses to tell him where the soul is. In the end, Gabriel kills him, albeit very reluctantly.

It's fitting that the only time you see Christopher Walken playing an angel is in a horror movie series, isn't it? While some may see his casting as Gabriel as bringing a camp factor that makes even this first movie hard to take seriously, there's also no doubt that he makes it much more entertaining that it would've been otherwise. Arriving on Earth following Uziel's demise, Gabriel destroys his corpse at the morgue, while forcing his undead servant, Jerry, to break into the police station and retrieve Uziel's personal belongings. Among them, he finds the obituary for Col. Hawthorne in Chimney Rock and has Jerry drive him out there, as he himself is unable to do so. Arriving there, he intends to take the colonel's soul from his body after he makes Jerry dig it up, only to find it's not there. That's when he confronts Simon and tries to get him to tell him where he's hidden the soul, even offering to let him join his crusade against God, but when Simon refuses to bend, despite the torture he puts him through, Gabriel kills him. On a hunch, he speaks with the children before school one morning, asking if any of them talked to Simon, and also checks to see if the soul inside one of them. Through his questioning, he learns about Mary, and eventually finds his way to her, but before he can extract the soul from her, by ripping her apart, he's confronted by Thomas and Katharine. Though they get some good licks in, they're obviously no match for Gabriel, and Katharine manages to incapacitate him purely by chance. When the police arrive, Thomas implores them to handcuff Gabriel's hands, which they do, reluctantly, thinking he's dead, but that's not enough, either, as on their way to the sacred site, they find the police car crashed and the sheriff and his deputy dead. Gabriel then goes to "recruit" another servant, choosing a woman named Rachael, bringing her back just as she dies from a terminal illness.

As always, Walken is a lot of fun to watch as Gabriel, bringing that strange sort of charisma he always has to the role. First of all, he looks cool, with that black overcoat, white dress shirt, and pants, as well as his black hair. Second, in his first appearance, 23 minutes in, he enters the crime scene that was Simon's apartment, sniffs and licks the dried blood he finds on a table, and determines that it was him. Then, he forces Jerry, a guy who tried to kill himself, to become his undead servant, and is constantly messing

with him when he's not ordering him around, telling him, "You look like shit," and, when he learns about Chimney Rock and Col. Hawthorne, asks, "You like the desert, Jerry?" On the way there, when Jerry asks why he needs him, Gabriel tells him, "It's a big universe, Jerry, and some things in it are talking monkey work. Monkeys, like you." He then suddenly yells for him to stop, gets out of the car, sniffs the air, and comments, "Ah, I can always smell a graveyard." He next forces Jerry to dig up Hawthorne's grave,

watching him while perched atop the tombstone, and when asked if he's enjoying himself, answers, "I always enjoy watching you work, Jerry." And when Jerry then asks if he's really keeping him alive, Gabriel clarifies, "Letting you die slower." To that, Jerry sarcastically tells him, "I'm so in your debt," and Gabriel, in that weird inflection that only Walken has, says, "Thank you, Jerry. I'm touched." When he sees Hawthorne's corpse after the coffin is uncovered and opened, Gabriel becomes so euphoric that he sounds like he's going to orgasm, telling Jerry, "Ooh, you are

looking at the cleverest, meanest, sickest talking monkey! I love him." Bending down and sniffing him, he tells Hawthorne, "Time to go. Gimme a kiss," and goes to suck the soul out, only to then find it's gone. Even when he's tormenting Simon, he still has a sense of humor about him here and there, telling him when he makes a futile effort to flee, "Simon, get serious," and when Simon refuses to speak, despite a whole night's worth of torment, Gabriel admits he's getting bored. He also makes some nicely-delivered, off-handed remarks, like when Thomas, in their first

meeting, asks how he knows his name, he answers, "Ah, you look like a Thomas," and I like his scene with the kids, where he lets one blow his horn (which he tells him to be careful about, given how it's meant to be a sign of the Apocalypse), and then sits a girl named Sarah on his lap and gently asks her about Simon, showing that he knows how to work them. When Katharine orders them all inside, they're disappointed, as they liked him, and as they leave, he says, "See ya, kids. Study your math. Key to the universe." Even in the middle of a life-and-death struggle, he has a funny line when Thomas kills Jerry, yelling, "Pest! You have any idea how hard it is to get one of those?!"

But that's another thing: as funny as Gabriel is, he can also be genuinely threatening when he wants to, especially when he loses his patience. When he realizes Hawthorne's soul is not in his body, and Jerry makes a crack about it, he yells at him to shut up. During his confrontation with Simon over it, his disdain and venom for humans really comes across, as he yells, "I'll not step aside. I will NOT ALLOW any talking monkey take my place. I'll burn down Heaven to stop it." He severely loses his patience with Simon

when he refuses to tell him, despite being continuously tortured over the course of a night, and flat-out yells at him to give it to him. Walken also shows off his skill to be calmly threatening, like in the scene in the church, when Thomas tries to intimidate Gabriel, telling him to look at him, but the way he does ends up creeping Thomas out. Gabriel tells him, "You know how you got that dent, in your top lip? Way back, before you were born, I told you a secret. Then, I put my finger there, and I said, 'Shh!'", and

then calmly walks out. The next day, when Katharine tells him and Jerry to leave the school's grounds, saying, "I don't know what's going on here," Gabriel appears to acquiesce, saying, "You're right," only to walk up to her and menacingly whisper, "You have no idea what's going on." Probably his creepiest moment is when, as she and Thomas are trying to save Mary from him, Katharine asks Gabriel, "Why?", and he growls, "I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from

now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why." As if that wasn't enough, he turns around and says to young Mary, "You, gimme a kiss," but she then grabs a gun and manages to shoot a couple of holes in him. And even after he's been incapacitated by the trailer's explosion and handcuffed behind his back, when Gabriel is placed in the back of the police car, he looks at Thomas and menacingly winks at him, a chilling sign that things aren't over.

Yet, Gabriel is not just a one-note villain. For one, he doesn't actually want to torture or even kill Simon. Like I said, before he begins the torture, he asks him to join him: "Help us make it like it was before the monkeys. You remember? We cast out Lucifer's army, you and I. We threw their rebel thrones from the wall... I don't wanna be a god, Simon. I just wanna make it like it was, before the lie. When he loved us best." That gets to the heart of why Gabriel is doing this: he's lost his own faith in God, something that

enables Thomas to relate with him. But, rather than use it as a weapon, as Lucifer suggests, he instead attempts to empathize with Gabriel, telling him his war is a lie, adding, "It's not about humans. It's about God... I know what it's like to be ignored, pushed aside. I know your anger, Gabriel. I know what it's like to lose your faith in the word. I know. 'Cause you hate him. You hate him just a little bit. 'Cause you're jealous. That's what this war is about: jealousy. Jealousy that he can love somethin' more than you.

Somethin' with a soul." Gabriel, who was about ready to kill Thomas at that point, is clearly shaken by this, and simply turns to go after Mary, who's in the midst of the exorcism. Thomas then asks, "If you wanted to prove your side was right, Gabriel, so badly... why didn't you just ask him? Why didn't you ask God?", and Gabriel walks back over to him, crouches down in front of him, and, in a truly sad tone, "Because... he doesn't talk to me anymore." And again, he just walks away, still intent upon prying Hawthorne's soul from Mary. He almost kills Katharine when she confronts

him, and Thomas, in turn, manages to drive in with his truck and beat him repeatedly with a tire iron, telling him to go back to Heaven. But then, Lucifer, whom Gabriel has about as much disdain for as humans, appears and, saying it's time to come home, rips out his heart, bites a big chunk out of it, and drags him down to Hell.

Because there are some other tasks he needs taken care of, and also because there are certain things he's simply incapable of, Gabriel often gets himself an undead servant. He ends up getting two over the course of the film, with the first being Jerry (Adam Goldberg), a depressed man who attempted suicide, only for Gabriel to intervene. Absolutely miserable with this state of limbo he's now in, which includes his body slowly decomposing, Jerry makes no effort to hide his disdain for Gabriel, and goes along with

him simply because he has no other choice. Though Gabriel constantly promises to release him once he's done, he drags it out further and further, having Jerry retrieve Uziel's belongings from the police station, drive him to Chimney Rock, dig up Col. Hawthorne, and even keep Simon from escaping during their confrontation. Thomas ends up putting Jerry out of his misery during the scene at Mary's trailer, much to Gabriel's aggravation, and he later goes to a hospital's ICU unit to find another servant. He eventually finds it in Rachael (Amanda Plummer), a woman whose condition he reads as, "Deteriorating. Critical," (to which he comments, "My favorite,"). Just as she's slipping away, he pulls her back, and she awakens to find him standing over, greeting her with a childlike, "Hi!" On the way to Old Woman View, Gabriel and Rachael stop at a roadside diner for directions, and once they have it, Gabriel tries to get her to come on. She actually refuses, only for Gabriel to point out, "Eternity here in that sagging skin suit, or one more day with me." He also adds that, while he can't drive, "I can wait... until stars burn out, if you don't make up your mind." That gets her to come on, but during the climax, she attacks Thomas to get him to kill her, which he does when he crashes his truck into the hut where Gabriel is attacking Katharine.

At the top of the third act, when Katharine walks outside as the healers are trying to help Mary, Viggo Mortensen suddenly appears, perched on a rock nearby, telling her that they need to talk. Asking him if he's angel as well, he tells her, "I was the first angel," revealing himself to be Lucifer, i.e. the devil himself. He then lays it all out for her, telling her about the war in Heaven over God's love for mankind above angels, and as a result of this thousands-year stalemate, no souls have made it up there, although some have made it down to Hell (he comments, "For while Heaven may be closed, I am always open, even on Christmas,"). He goes on to tell her about Gabriel's plan for Col. Hawthorne's soul, and that, if he's successful, his Heaven will eventually just become another Hell. As far as Lucifer is concerned, that's unacceptable, and offers to help them defeat Gabriel and open Heaven up back for mankind. Katharine tells Thomas of this encounter, and he feels that Lucifer should've come to him instead. He gets his wish, as Lucifer pays him a visit the next day, giving him the idea to use Gabriel's lack of faith against him. During the climax, just as Thomas is about to beat Gabriel to death with a tire iron, Lucifer appears, stops him, and while the others finish exorcising Mary, he confronts Gabriel. He says that this war has nothing to do with him but Lucifer tells him, "Your war is arrogance. That makes it evil. That's mine." He then adds that he has to come home, before ripping out his heart, biting into it, and having this demonic servant that follows him around take Gabriel down to Hell. However, he attempts to make both Thomas and Katharine come with him, telling the latter, "You owe me one," and that she'll eventually ask him for it, "Because anything else will be worse than you ever imagined." Ultimately, they both refuse, and he leaves, but makes a not so subtle threat, telling Thomas to, "Keep the lights on." He then walks outside and vanishes by turning into a flock of crows.

Although he doesn't have nearly as much screentime, like Christopher Walken, Mortensen makes the most of his role, bringing his own brand of dark charisma and creepiness to it. One of his first lines is to threaten Katharine when she initially refuses to talk, telling her, "I can lay you out and fill your mouth with your mother's feces, or we can talk," and when he introduces himself as the first angel, "Loved once above all others," he then softly sings, "But like all true love... one day, it withered on the vine." Also,

while talking with Katharine, he picks the petals off a flower, then eats the whole thing, stem and all. And when he first speaks with Thomas, he has his hands on his shoulder-blades, caressing them, as he leans over him from behind, taunting, "Little Tommy Dagget. How I loved listening to your sweet prayers every night. And then you'd jump in your bed, so afraid I was under there. And I was!" He continues acting a little too touchy-feely for Thomas when he advises him about how to defeat Gabriel, and when he confronts Gabriel himself, pulling his heart out and

biting into it, Lucifer comes off as quite ecstatic about what he's doing. And when he tries to tempt Thomas and Katharine to come with him back to Hell, he speaks in a seething, shrill whisper, saying, "I love you! I love you more than Jesus!", with blood all around his mouth, and showing all of his teeth. Interestingly, after appearing only briefly in the next film, Satan would play a considerable role in the last two Prophecy movies.

One way in which The Prophecy is able to personally appeal to me is in its setting. While not much is done with it, as the main story quickly shifts to Chimney Rock, I like that the movie is initially set in Los Angeles, rather than somewhere like New York, as the air and feel of the West Coast is one I enjoy a lot more. We see places like Thomas' fairly well-to-do apartment, the lower-rent one that Simon initially stays at, and Jerry's utterly rundown, depressing one, as well as the city streets and alleyways, and the interiors of both the morgue where Joseph works and

Thomas' office at the precinct, and while none of them are anything that special, they do their job. Really, the first setting of note that we get is the enormous church in the opening where Thomas is nearly ordained, only to lose his faith, and the filmmakers make sure you soak in every inch of it, from the lovely architecture and statue-work, much of which depict the traditional vision of angels, to just how huge of a place it is. But the film's true setting and where it ultimately climaxes is in the deserts of Arizona, much of it taking place in the fairly small

town of Chimney Rock. While not exactly a speck on the map, you learn from Katharine that the place has been in bad shape since its copper mine closed down. Thus, the school, the place in town which gets the most focus, has to teach all of the grades from one small corner, while much of the rest of it is closed off and used as a makeshift storage area, with desks, tables, and lots of other junk; naturally, this is where Simon hides after taking Col. Hawthorne's soul. Speaking of which, we see the inside of his former

home, wherein Thomas finds clues pointing to his dark secrets, as well as the local church, where Simon first takes the soul and where Thomas later has his first run-in with Gabriel, and the small graveyard that Gabriel and Jerry visit in the middle of the night in order to dig up Hawthorne's grave. Two very important settings right outside of town include the trailer where Mary lives with her grandmother, and the aforementioned copper mine. The former, a very cramped dwelling out in the middle of nowhere, in

what seems to be an old parking lot, with old, unused cars lying around, gives a hint of the poverty that does plague the residents, while the latter, where Gabriel and Jerry hole up, is also where Thomas and Katharine find angelic scripture and see horrific visions that prove to them what they're dealing with.

Speaking of the middle of nowhere, I've always loved the desert as a setting in general, both for the sense of isolation it gives to horror movies and thrillers, as well as just the sheer beauty of it. The Prophecy's use of it leans more into the latter and we get a lot of it, particularly during the third act when, after the confrontation with Gabriel at Mary's trailer, Thomas, Katharine, and her grandmother take her to the sacred site of Old Woman View, with a small settlement atop it. Seriously, Gregory Widen and his cinematographers, Richard Clabaugh and Bruce

Douglas Johnson, must've felt the same way about this type of environment as I do, because there are so many beauty shots of the desert itself and on top of the mountain, often lit by the orange glow of a sunset, the fading light of dusk, or covered in the darkness of night, which is very fitting for the scene where Katharine first meets with Lucifer. We also get to see a little roadside diner out in the middle of the desert, where Gabriel and Rachael briefly stop to ask for directions to Old Woman View. Going back to said

place, I also like the Native American aesthetic here, not just with the characters and locations, but also in the rituals used to exorcise Hawthorne's spirit from Mary, and at a site that's sacred to the tribe from which she originates, something you wouldn't expect to see in a film with this subject matter. It's especially interesting to see a Native American exorcism ritual being performed just feet away from where Satan is pulling Gabriel's heart out of his chest, both of which lead to the ending of a war that's been waged in Heaven for thousands of years.

Besides the beautiful scenery and setting during the third act, the movie also has a good amount of really cool imagery throughout it, most connected to the war in Heaven. It opens with an overhead shot of Simon, standing in a surreal desert landscape, looking down at the skeletal remains of what we can assume is another angel, as the camera slowly descends down to over his shoulder. Also, there are several times where we see flashes of the visions that made Thomas lose his faith: angels screaming in agony and attacking each other, with blood spilling on the ground, and it

culminates in the scene late in the film where Thomas and Katharine go into the abandoned copper mine. While Thomas looks at the angelic script on the walls, the flame in their oil lantern suddenly flares up, the shadow of an impaled angel stretches across the wall in front of them, and they turn around to see it in person, the angel attempting to remove himself from the stake he's on, before falling limp. It then pans past him to show an entire battlefield littered with hundreds of dead angels, impaled on stakes and

spears. And during the climax, when Lucifer tears Gabriel's heart out, at the same time that Hawthorne's soul is expelled from Mary, you see some amazing shots of angels flying through the cloud-filled sky, illuminated by flashes of lightning behind them, along with the soul being destroyed by a beam of light shining down from Heaven. Other memorable imagery and moments include an eerily silent dream that Mary has where she walks out to Hawthorne's grave in the small cemetery, stands there, and he

walks up behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders; the many shots of the angels perched in spots like birds, with some of them actually looking like birds from certain angles; and finally, all of the religious and spiritual imagery, like the traditional angel statues in the church during the opening, and the angelic script later on.

Though it proved to be fairly controversial at the time, Gregory Widen's core concept for the movie, portraying angels as complex and even downright frightening beings who commit some truly horrific acts, as described in the Old Testament rather than how they're typically depicted as pure spirits who help people, is an intriguing one. Thomas himself even tells Katharine, "Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a

creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?" And sure enough, as I've said, none of the angels and other such beings in the film are depicted as being entirely benevolent towards mankind. Even Simon, the least antagonistic one, is more interested in stopping the war rather than actively helping man. While he does appear to sympathize with and even relate to Thomas' disillusionment in their scene together early on, he doesn't give him any warning of

what's coming. Also, while he's intent on keeping Col. Hawthorne's soul from being used by either side, as he doesn't want any more bloodshed, the way in which he places the soul into Mary, making her sick and causing her to become sporadically possessed, is a really dickish move. And it's all compounded by how Satan himself is the one who helps to stop Gabriel, allowing the others to exorcise said soul from Mary, albeit for his own reasons and not out of any sympathy or affection for those involved. It's also

interesting to think of angels becoming jealous that God would favor man above them and give us souls, and they would wage a war for thousands of years as a result, as is the notion that they would use the darkest, most depraved human soul possible to tip the tide of the war in their favor because, as Lucifer tells Katharine, "Humans... know more about war and treachery of the spirit than any angel." Most intriguing of all, though, is the notion that an angel, a being meant to be God's right hand, could have a crisis of faith and feel pushed aside and ignored by him, in the same manner as a human, as is the case with Gabriel.

Another reason why certain factions weren't too fond of this film is how, in creating its story, specifically the prophecy of the title, it plays very fast and loose with the Bible, to the point of making stuff up wholesale. At the beginning of the movie, Thomas says, "Of all the gospels I learned in seminary school, a verse from St. Paul stays with me. It is perhaps the strangest passage in the Bible, in which he writes, 'Even now in Heaven there are Angles carrying savage weapons,'" though no such verse exists. Similarly, a 23rd chapter of the Book of Revelations

is uncovered, telling of the second war in Heaven, but unlike that verse, it's acknowledged as having been unknown to exist before then. And it introduces a type of angelic script which is also found covering the walls of the copper mine near Chimney Rock. Though I personally sometimes find religious-themed horror to be more effective when it makes use of scripture and verses known to actually exist, giving it more of a creepy feeling that this is something that could truly happen, especially if you're very religious, this film making stuff up doesn't completely destroy it for me, either.

However, the physical depiction of the angels is something I personally have a hard time taking seriously, even if I think Gabriel looks cool. They come off as a little too stylized in how they all wear these long overcoats over clothing that's a mixture of light and dark, and don't try to act even the least bit inconspicuous in how they move, act, and often perch themselves like birds (although, as I alluded to earlier, I do like how, when Uziel is perched outside of Simon's apartment building, the camera angle, in conjunction with the back of his long overcoat, do

make him look like a large bird). In retrospect, it really makes sense when you know this was written and directed by the man who created Highlander, given how that movie was also about long-coat wearing immortals battling each other for supremacy, and making it feel like Widen has a somewhat limited imagination when it comes to certain concepts. I do think it's interesting how the angels have acute senses, with the main one they use being smell, as Simon is able to detect Uziel's approaching attack in his apartment, and Gabriel often sniffs around for those

he's hunting for or specific places, like a graveyard. In addition, they're shown to be quite tough and agile, with certain powers, like being able to absorb a soul into themselves and transfer it to another living being, while Gabriel is able to bring the immediate dead back as his slaves, render somebody unconscious by touching and simultaneously shushing them, and set others aflame. Regardless, when they're on Earth, there are certain things they're unable to do, like drive a vehicle (I guess they can't use their wings when not

in Heaven), which is why Gabriel enlists some undead servants to taxi him around. Also, they can be killed, typically by having their heart removed. I say "typically" because Uziel comes off as a strangely weak and malformed angel, as Simon kills him fairly easily, without removing his heart (Uziel does go for that same killing move on Simon), and his body chemistry is later revealed to be akin to that of an aborted fetus. Maybe all of the angels' physiology is like that, but that doesn't explain why, besides being

so weak, Uziel has no eyes. When Simon first arrives on Earth, we see that the angels appear not to have them at first, but then quickly develop them (also, Gabriel's eyes disappear when he's killed). So why was Uziel not able to do so and, instead, had to wear dark glasses to conceal it? And how did he die without his heart being removed (unless it was torn out during the fall and I just missed it)?

While it has nothing on the Hellraiser franchise, there is some dark subject matter in this story, either alluded to or dealt with head-on. Though we know, given who he is and what he's trying to accomplish, that Simon would never do anything perverse, the idea of a young girl finding a grown man hiding on her school's property, him asking her to not tell anyone he's there, and then spending a lot of time alone with her, is kind of inherently icky, as it is when Katharine pulls up to find Gabriel talking to the kids on the school's steps, with a little girl on his lap. Not

to mention that Simon not only puts Hawthorne's soul into her, and she suffers greatly from it, but he does so by basically kissing her right on the mouth (after telling her to come to him and close her eyes, no less), with Gabriel later flat-out telling her, "Gimme a kiss," while approaching her during the fight in the trailer. Speaking of Hawthorne, as if it weren't bad enough that Mary has a dark soul inhabiting her for much of the movie, not long after Simon puts it into her, we learn just how monstrous of a person the colonel was

when Thomas looks through his home and finds he'd been indicted for war crimes against the Chinese that involved human sacrifice and cannibalism! He watches film reels containing documentation of these atrocities, like impaled corpses, pits filled with bodies, and even shots of Hawthorne with what looks like blood around his mouth, blankly staring straight ahead, as well as footage from his court martial. And when Thomas looks through a black case Hawthorne is seen holding in the footage, he finds it contains the

flayed faces of some of his victims. That makes the dream sequence of him standing behind Mary in the graveyard even more unsettling, just as it is when she becomes possessed by him and talks about how a "Chinaman" bleeds differently from others, and later describes Old Woman View as a good place to hold off an incoming attack.

At the same time, the film has more than its fair share of humor, most of it effective and fitting, but other moments, not so much. I think Joseph's kind of sardonic humor works because he never goes too over-the-top and also because his scenes tend to happen in isolation. I've described in detail a lot of Gabriel's humorous and quirky moments (one I forgot to mention is how, even though he's rebelling against God, he gets offended whenever someone says "goddamn," and tells them to watch the profanity) but, as off-the-wall as he can get, (it is Christopher

Walken, after all), I don't think they hurt the moments where Gabriel decides to get serious, as Walken is able to easily transition from one to the other, or the overall serious nature of the film, since the other characters and the situation are played straight. However, the moments between Gabriel and both of his undead servants are where I think the movie goes a tad too far. When we're first introduced to Jerry, we get establishing shots of the squalor of his apartment, as well as of a noose hanging in front of an 

"Employee of the Month" certificate on the wall, and when we then see him, sitting at a table, looking really depressed, with cigarette smoke curling up into the air in front of him, the camera slowly moves in towards him as he's staring ahead blankly, all while a goofy, bluesy song called Your Best Friend plays on the soundtrack. That's when Gabriel tells him that he looks like shit and we cut to a wide shot that shows him perched atop the table next to Jerry. If I didn't know any better, I would've thought John Landis was 

the director here, and the same goes for all the scenes when Gabriel is bossing poor Jerry around, coming off like a bullying former friend who's holding something over Jerry, like when he tells him to stop whining about wanting to be truly dead. Also, during the scene with the kids, there's a random cutaway to Jerry dealing with bloody mucus coming out of his nose, which really feels unnecessary. And later, after he resurrects Rachael, the two of them are next seen

sitting in the roadside diner while looking for Old Woman View, Gabriel with bloody bullet-wounds on his shirt that he's not at all trying to hide, and Rachael looking like she's about to keel over any second, with very cliche country music playing. While Gabriel asks the waitress, Madge, for directions, Rachael mutters something under her breath, which concerns her. Then, when Rachael starts crying, and Gabriel warns, "Don't do that!", Madge, eager to get rid of them as quickly as she can, gives Gabriel very detailed directions to the site. Again, a bit too much for what this movie is going for.

While not a full-on gore-fest, the film does have its fair of gruesome makeup effects and unsettling images, as seen at the very beginning, when we get glimpses of Thomas' visions of the heavenly war and then, just a few minutes later, during their brief fight, Uziel tries to rip Simon's heart out and Simon, in turn, throws him out the window, where he gets hit and slammed against the wall of the building by a car. You later see his badly scarred up corpse, with a massive hole in the torso, when Thomas first talks with Joseph at the morgue, and after Gabriel destroys

the corpse, you later see the gnarly, ashy aftermath. Similarly, you see how badly burned Simon is after Gabriel repeatedly sets him aflame over the course of a night, before ripping his heart out and reducing him to ash offscreen. One of the most disturbing bits of imagery, mainly because it looks so realistic, is when Thomas discovers the flayed faces that Col. Hawthorne kept hidden in the black box in his house, and the same goes for the vision of impaled angels that Thomas and Katharine see in the mine, with the first one looking like it was an animatronic puppet,

given the way in which he moves (after he dies in front of them, he's clearly a dummy). And the goriest moment in the movie comes at the end, when Lucifer rips out and bites into Gabriel's heart, getting blood all over his mouth in the process. Also, the overall makeup designs for both Uziel and Satan's servant are simple but effective. However, despite the spiritual subject matter, there aren't many visual effects here, likely due to the modest budget, and what we do see are pretty obvious instances of digital morphing and

compositing, like when Gabriel first sets Simon aflame onscreen, the wide-shots of Thomas and Katharine seeing the visions in the mine, the shots of the angels in the sky above Old Woman View during the climax, a random moment during the exorcism when Mary's face seems to suddenly become much fatter before she expels Hawthorne's soul (that could be a mix of morphing and makeup), the shots of the soul and the heavenly light that destroys it (which look especially archaic, with the soul sometimes coming off as a stop-motion effect that has digital effects laid over it), and when Lucifer turns into a cloud of crows when he departs at the end.

Though I've noted that there are thematic similarities between this film and Highlander, don't go into The Prophecy expecting some grand action setpieces. Also likely a result of the budget, what few action scenes there are tend to be very brief and not that impressive. The fight between Simon and Uziel at the beginning is just Simon running to meet Uziel in midair when he crashes through his apartment window, Uziel throwing him up against the wall, and the two of them having a brief struggle where Uziel 

tries to rip Simon's heart out, Simon getting the upper-hand, bending him over the window sill, removing his glasses, and then throwing him out to the street below. The most memorable setpiece is the confrontation with Gabriel in Mary's trailer, with Thomas shooting Jerry full of holes when he attacks him, while Gabriel tosses Katharine aside when she tries to stop him from killing Mary, and then does the same to Thomas out of anger for killing his servant. Surprisingly, Mary grabs Thomas' discarded gun and 

shoots Gabriel twice, slowing him down long enough for Katharine to get her out of the trailer. Thomas tries to stop Gabriel again, only to get thrown around like a rag-doll and out one of the windows (said action isn't as exciting as it might sound). Gabriel exits the trailer and stomps towards Katharine and Mary, the former shooting at him and hitting a nearby propane tank, blowing the trailer up in a rather impressive explosion. And the climax at Old Woman View starts with Thomas using a taut chain across the road to stop Gabriel and Rachael's car, the impact sending Gabriel

through the windshield (even though they don't seem to be traveling that fast for it to happen). Thomas then tries to confront him but is overpowered, and is only spared a potentially fatal beating when he uses Gabriel's crippled faith against him. As Gabriel walks over to the hut where the exorcism is being performed on Mary, Thomas gets into a truck and drives after him, only for Rachael to crash through the back window and attack him, causing him to swerve. Katharine manages to hold Gabriel off for a bit with a shot to the midsection, but he then grabs her head,

preparing to crush her skull. At that moment, Thomas comes crashing through the wall behind, knocking them both to the floor, and putting Rachael out of her misery. Thomas then grabs a tire iron and beats on Gabriel, telling him to go back home, but before he can finish him off, Lucifer appears and stops him. He proceeds to rip out Gabriel's heart and bite into it, as the others succeed in driving Hawthorne's soul out of Mary.

Ultimately, despite all of the compliments I can give it, I think the biggest reason why The Prophecy is not a movie I've ever come to really love is because, while I like the concepts introduced and the questions they raise, Gregory Widen doesn't quite stick the landing with them. He doesn't go much further with the notion of angels themselves having crises of faith and being jealous of mankind because God put us above all others, as well as gave us souls, than simply stating it. There are a few instances of introspection

into it, like when Gabriel tells Simon, "No one hears the Word anymore. No one!... There's only the argument!", and when he tells Thomas that God flat-out doesn't talk to him anymore, but that's about it. As for the second war in Heaven, because of the budget, Widen is only able to show us brief glimpses of it, and while some of them are distressing, as is the notion that Gabriel's side is planning to use Col. Hawthorne's very evil soul to tip the war's scale in their favor, I don't really feel how major the stakes are

supposed to be. In fact, while the revelation that, if he wins, Gabriel's rule over Heaven will cause it to become another Hell, meaning no one's soul will be at rest, is a horrific one, his victory doesn't seem to put mankind in any immediate danger. If he were planning to use his newfound power to wipe out humanity after managing to overthrow God, then there would be more of a sense of urgency in the need to stop him, but instead, the only real drive during the third act is to exorcise Hawthorne's soul from Mary and keep Gabriel from tearing her apart to get at it. Fair enough, as Mary is a cute, likable girl, but in this kind of story, you'd expect there to be much more to lose.

Also, by the end of the movie, Thomas has regained the faith he lost before he was to be ordained, but I don't know why. Yeah, he now knows that Heaven, angels, and even Satan are real, but he also knows that angels are apparently bastards, even the benevolent ones, as well as that God doesn't love all beings equally like he's supposed to, going to the point of flat-out ignoring Gabriel, and that he allowed this second war in Heaven to occur. Moreover, Thomas doesn't know why he was shown the horrific

visions that caused him to have a nervous breakdown or why "the voice" that he says called him to his faith suddenly abandoned him at that exact moment (he goes as far as to tell Katharine, "It's better never having known that voice,"). That would've made me even more despondent and hopeless about it than I already was, and yet, after empathizing with Gabriel, saying he knows how he feels, when Lucifer tries to tempt him and Katharine to come back to Hell with him, Thomas tells him that he has both his faith and his soul. And his final line of narration summing it all

up is really cliched and comes off like he's writing his own gospel: "And in the end, I think it must be about faith. And if faith is a choice, then it can be lost, for a man, an angel, or the devil himself. And if faith means never completely understanding God's plan, then maybe understanding just a part of it, our part, is what it is to have a soul. And maybe, in the end, that's what being human is, after all."

The music score by David C. Williams is another aspect of the film that I would say is one of its strengths. As you might expect, it does play into the film's religious nature, with lots of vocalizing voices, sometimes in the background, like with Simon's memorable leitmotif, and sometimes more overt, like what you hear when Uziel first arrives on Earth and when Gabriel destroys his corpse in the morgue. In fact, it goes more for a feeling of grandeur and spiritual divinity than it ever does for the horror side of things, though there are some scenes, like when Thomas uncovers Col. Hawthorne's dark secrets and his first meeting with Gabriel afterward, that are scored in an unnerving manner. The music for the former scene is downright freaky, with lots of unsettling sounds, dull thuds, and softly screeching strings that go nicely with the silent film footage of Hawthorne's atrocities and court martial. Also, the scene in the copper mine is scored in a similarly nightmarish manner, with yelling voices that combine with the angels' screams of agony to make it almost unbearable to listen to. But my personal favorite parts of the score are during the third act, when it goes for more of a Native American flavor, with rhythmic tapping sounds and a really beautiful, vocalizing female voice accentuating the landscape when both the protagonists and Gabriel are heading towards Old Woman View; I'm a sucker for that kind of music, anyway. I also like the similar music that plays during the climax, combining with the visuals to make it feel quite profound.

As for the soundtrack, you, of course, have classical Christian pieces, like the Gregorian chant, Gloria Laus, heard over the opening credits, and Ave Maria, which the kids are singing during the recital when Katharine and Mary are first introduced. At the same time, there's also that goofy bluesy song, Your Best Friend, by Peter Bear and E. Sandra Jones, which you hear during Jerry's introductory scene. And speaking of bluesy, Angel in Black by Shawn Amos can be hear playing in the background when Gabriel makes Jerry dig up Col. Hawthorne's grave (maybe a bit too on the nose there, huh?). Finally, Breakin' Down by Skid Row plays over the ending credits, a song that just makes me go, "Eh. It was the 90's."

In the end, The Prophecy has a number of things that make it worth watching, like a really good cast, with Christopher Walken, as per usual, being an enjoyable and, at the same time, somewhat nuanced villain; good cinematography and use of setting; an interesting take on the concept of angels, God, and the Bible that will likely not sit well with those who are very religious; well-done makeup effects; and a pretty good music score. However, while it has a unique concept when it comes to the angels, it doesn't

explore it as much as you'd hope, the actual depiction of them is a bit too stylized to take seriously, coming off as if Gregory Widen hadn't quite shaken off Highlander, and there even some inconsistencies in it. On top of that, a major subplot isn't resolved in a very satisfying manner, the film's sense of humor, while mostly well-done, has instances where it gets a bit too goofy for its own good, most of the visual effects are a bit dated, and since the movie didn't have the budget for big action scenes, those that are here are just okay. All in all, a movie that I can respect and find good things in, but overall, not one that grabs me enough to watch over and over again, and the same goes for this whole franchise.