After an engaged couple mysteriously disappears in the Bermuda Triangle, her father organizes an expedition to get to the truth. And the truth? Extraterrestrials are carrying out studies on the human race!

The best part of this movie is the opening, where a monologue starts us off, quoting from several books over UFO footage. This has nothing to do with the rest of the film, which makes it even more awesome.

People get possessed by the Bermuda Triangle, ghost ships show up and the ending is a lot like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, if you also added in a giant Moai from Easter Island. Yes, it’s the second best part of the film. And oh look — Mike is played by Gianni Garko, who you’d probably know better for playing the character Sartana and being in Devil Fish.

Director Tonino Ricci also directed A Man Called Rage and Cave of the Sharks. Hopefully, those movies are much better than this one, which is very talky and every time it aspires to be something interesting, it runs as hard as it can away from it. But the beginning and the ending? Worth watching.

If you want to see it for yourself, Cult Action has the DVD and you can also watch it on Amazon Prime.

Brought to you by the “father of redneck cinema,” Charles B. Griffith, this movie is more Jaws than Creature from the Black Lagoon. Griffith was told to make an action movie, but he got a depressing looking creature and decided to make a comedy. By the time he flew back home, producer Roger Corman had already recut it in into a horror movie.

Welcome to Maui, where the staff, tourists and locals are starting to disappear. Turns out that an underwater earthquake has released some very hungry prehistoric fish (I caught a bowfin once as a kid and it’s a trout with teeth, a horrifying beast that hasn’t changed much from its prehistoric version). Local fishermen all team up to hunt and kill the beast, just like Jaws, except everyone has guns.

Sam Bottoms, brother of Timothy, plays Greg Oliver, one of the locals. And so is R. Lee Emery, in an early role. Neither of them are the tourist who yells, “Oh my God, it’s a monster fish!” a line that made me so happy I nearly passed out.

Believe it or not, Corman’s New World Pictures double-billed this feature with Cronenberg’s The Brood, a fact that makes me happy if the audience was rewarded with The Brood first. If not, I’m not certain how many folks would still be in the theater.

Griffith called this film a “terrible experience.” He should have had to watch this piece of shit!

If you want to see it for yourself, Shout! Factory released this on a double disk with Demon of Paradise. And yes, I watched that. So get ready for more bile.

The Black Hole is more than just the first Disney movie to be rated PG and to feature swearing (as well as one of the most expensive they’d produced at that point). It’s also a dark film, one closer to Event Horizon than Escape from Witch Mountain.

The USS Palomino is near the end of its long journey through deep space as they discover a black hole. Its crew — Dr. Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins, Psycho), Captain Dan Holland (Robert Forster, Jackie Brown), Lieutenant Charles Pizer, journalist Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine, The Devil’s Rain!), Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux, The Time Machine) who has ESP and a robot named V.I.N.C.E.N.T. (Vital Information Necessary Centralized) who is voiced by Roddy McDowell — somehow escapes the gravity of the black hole, along with a gigantic ship, the USS Cygnus.

Boarding what they believe to be an abandoned ship, they meet Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell, Judgment at Nuremberg), a scientist who has studied the black hole alone for twenty years. Most of the human crew had gone back to Earth, other than Kate’s father, who stayed onboard until he died. Reinhardt’s goal is to fly the Cygnus through the black hole.

That’s all a lie — the human crew was lobotomized and is now the robotic drone army that prowls the Cygnus. The only others are Old B.O.B. (BiO-sanitation Battalion, voiced by Slim Pickens) and Maximilian, a demonic red robot eager for combat.

Only Durant wants to stay behind and help, but once he learns that the crew is human (the scene where he removes the reflective faceplate of a drone to see a zombie face is pretty horrific for a Disney film), he tries to run with Kate. Maximilian catches up and kills him and Reinhardt orders Kate lobotomized.

Holland, V.I.N.C.E.N.T. and B.O.B. rescue Kate just as Booth tries to leave alone, damaging the Palomino. As a meteor storm picks up, the Cygnus begins to break down. The survivors make their way to a small probe ship as Reinhardt is trapped beneath wreckage. His crew looks on, unmoved, as he struggles.

Maximilian makes his play and attacks the crew, killing B.O.B. before V.I.N.C.E.N.T. sends him into the black hole. Finally, Holland, Pizer, McCraw and V.I.N.C.E.N.T. escape in the probe, yet their path takes them directly into the black hole.

Once inside, we see visions of Heaven and Hell, where Reinhardt and Maximilian become one amongst the flames. Then, an angel flies through a crystal tunnel and creates a white hole, which we see the probe emerge through. Finally, we see the ship fly toward a new planet in an ending which can only be described as Disney’s 2001. Actually, that makes it sound stupid. The imagery of Hell is super intense, with robed figures watching Maximilian rise from the bowels of Hades. I could watch it on loop all day long.

So what really happened? In the novelization of the film, as our heroes crosse the event horizon, all matter ceases to exist. That said, Kate’s ESP links their minds, allow them to survive while their atoms are scattered. The Whitman comics adaptation ends with the crew reaching a parallel universe where they encounter alternate universe versions of Reinhardt, Old B.O.B., Maximilian and Kate’s father. In fact, this series went on past the movie, hinting at perhaps what a sequel would be about. Finally, in the Disney Read-Along album and book, the crew survives, with Captain Holland saying, “We’ve been trained to find new worlds. Let’s go find one for ourselves!”

NOTE: I listened to TONS of Disney storybooks and books on record as a child. Just the sound of the voice at the beginning of this sends me into warm, wonderful feelings of a childhood day spend with my feet under the covers, listening to this story over and over again.

Disney even put out a soundtrack for the movie that features the entire story, as well as dialogue not in the film!

There’s also an AMAZING Disney Sounds of Outer Space record that I listened to regularly. The album art directly references the robot drones from The Black Hole.

Mego — who famously declined making Star Wars figures — made a complete line of figures for the movie. The Mego Museum has a great page devoted to these toys (there were also large-scale human figures). Famously, my brother had V.I.N.C.E.N.T. but refused to allow anyone else to play with the figure. There’s also a Halloween photo of him wearing a visor that made his five-year-old head look like that little bot. I won’t share it here in fear of the reprisals that he could send my way. After all, I dressed as Papa Smurf one year.

Even crazier, Disney hired Jack Kirby to adapt the film as part of their “Walt Disney’s Treasury of Classic Tales” newspaper strip, along with takes on The Watcher in the Woods, Condorman and The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark. The art for these is stunning and well worth hunting down.

For years, I believed that The Black Hole was a slow-moving effort, much like Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But after watching it again, I was taken with how quickly it moves and how gorgeous the visuals are, thanks to solid direction by Gary Nelson(who also was in the chair for the original Freaky Friday). The film is big and brash and bold, the way only late 70’s movies can be — the movie starts with an overture, one of the last films to do so! It certainly is no ripoff of Star Wars, but obviously got made because of that film’s success.

Notorious ruiner of fun and pompous asshole astrophysicist (assholetrophyicist?) Neil deGrasse Tyson claims that this is the least scientifically accurate movie of all time: “They not only got none of the physics right about falling into a black hole, had they gotten it right it would have been a vastly more interesting movie.” I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. Fuck Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Let’s finish on an up note. Famous science fiction writer (and notorious crank, but I think that’s awesome and he should totally not sue me) Harlan Ellison was to be the scientific consultant for The Black Hole. On his very first day, he pitched an idea over lunch for an animated Disney porn with all of their best-known characters. Roy Disney heard and fired him on the spot. I’ve heard the story for years — it appears on his site, after all — but I’ve never heard it connected to The Black Hole until I did research for this article.

There are times that films feel like gift packages wrapped up for just me and my insane taste in movies. Let me tell you all of the ways that The Humanoid makes me want to fall to my knees and give thanks: It’s an Italian ripoff of Star Wars directed by Aldo Lado (Who Saw Her Die?, The Short Night of the Glass Dolls) working under the pseudonym George B. Lewis, a name that sounds close to George Lucas. It’s got Ivan Rassimov, the crazy-eyed star of such B&S About Movies favorites as Planet of the Vampires, Shock, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key and All the Colors of the Dark as Lord Graal, the samurai helmet and black armor-clad bad guy who is this film’s Darth Vader. It’s got James Bond henchman supreme Richard Kiel as Golob, a giant henchman who wears a jacket straight out of Brotherhood of the Wolf. It’s got Arthur Kennedy (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) in it! And it starts with the same shot Star Wars does, with a giant ship filling the screen and a crawl of type. And much like Starcrash, it transcends its inspiration to become a batshit insane movie unto itself.

The film begins with a voiceover that lets you know exactly what you’re getting into: “Metropolis, known ages ago as planet Earth, now faces its gravest hour. Lord Graal has just escaped from the prison satellite where his brother, ruler of the peaceful, galactic democracy, had exiled him. Malevolent and power-hungry, Graal has plans of vengeance that might forever alter the destiny of mankind.”

The Great Brother (Massimo Serato, Don’t Look Now, The Killer Nun) rules Metropolis but now has quite a challenge. His brother, Graal (Rassimov) is working with the mad scientist Dr. Kraspin (Kennedy) to make an army of humanoids that are mutated by the element Kapitron, which can only be found on Metropolis. Helping Graal with his scheme is his lover, Lady Agatha (Ringo Starr’s wife Barbara Bach, who appeared with him in Caveman and as Agent XXX in The Spy Who Loved Me), who has the craziest hair ever, a blowout combaround that must be seen to be believed. She’s also kept alive by daily injections of blood, thanks to Kraspin, in a scene that adds a little bit of sleaze (the original cut of the film has nudity, but this was chopped out to hit a PG rating).

“You’re all the same, the lot of you. I bet you hate stormtroopers, too.”
“You make it easy.”

Graal orders his troops to steal the Kapitron and to kill Barbara Gibson (Corinne Cléry, who you just know by now I’m going to excitedly tell you was in Yor, Hunter from the Future, but she was also in Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey, The Story of O and Moonraker), who may have a normal name, but she’s the person who had sent Kraspin to a mental ward. She’s saved by Tom Tom, a young Asian boy with mental powers who communicates with two mysterious beings.

That’s when we meet Golob (Kiel), who originally speaks in the happy voice he’d use to great effect as Mr. Larson as Happy Gilmore, saying things like “Where in the cosmos did that space jockey get his license?” before the Kapitron process turns him into a humanoid. Now, his beard is gone and he becomes, well, The Hulk. His robot dog best friend, Kip, can only watch in sadness as his master is kidnapped. Don’t worry, Kip. Soon, you’ll be able to piss all over the floor and fake stormtroopers will fall into it. I didn’t make that up. It really happens in this movie.

Golob is a machine, taking people out left and right. Even our hero, Nick (Leonard Mann, Bart Winslow from the original Flowers in the Attic!) can barely escape with his life. Only Tom Tom can settle down Golob, saving Barabra and taking out the brain chip that controls the giant of a man…err, humanoid.

However, Barbara is soon taken by Graal’s men, who wear the same outfits as the bad guys in Yor, Hunter from the Future, as that film’s director Antonio Margheriti did the effects for this one. Tom Tom and Golob are saved by the mysterious traveler, who shoot the stormtroopers with magic arrows like something out of Fulci’s Conquest.

Nick, Golob, Tom Tom and Kip all make their way to Graal’s base, where they must stop him from using a missile filled with Kapitron to turn all of Metropolis into humanoids that he can control.

Lady Agatha only wanted Barbara for one reason — to get her youth for the best serum yet. Luckily, Nick and Golob save the day and our femme fatale rapidly ages into a skeleton. Of course we have a final battle with Nick (a way worse name than Luke Skywalker and I kind of demand better names in my Italian ripoff films, like Akton and Stella Starr) and Graal, Kraspin gets his comeuppance and Golob saves the day, mutating back to his bearded form.

That said — the battle with Nick and Graal is amazing, because Graal can make his hands glow blue and shoot out lasers, which made my inner eight-year-old dance with glee.

Now that the say has been saved, Tom Tom then tells everyone that he has to go back to his ancient homeland  — Tibet. Then, a voiceover ends the film:

“Once again Planet Earth had narrowly escaped disaster. Once again, it had found in itself the intelligence, the insight and the strength to repel a mortal enemy. Once again, man was to live at peace in the galaxy.”

The Humanoid never reaches the insanity that you want it to until the final battle, but it’s still a fun movie. It’s even got music by Ennio Morricone that sounds like a space version of “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.” But if I saw this film when I was a little kid, I would have been drawing it in class instead of learning important things like world history and math.

Want to know more about this movie? Then you can get lost at the Golob the Humanoid website, which has tons of info on this film and plenty of other Italian science fiction movies.

Jean Rollin was a master of the fantastique, the way that the French refer to a mixture of science fiction, horror and fantasy. What’s the difference between fantastique and fantasy? The former is more concerned with the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative. In this genre, the supernatural may be met with doubt, disbelief and fear; yet it always exists.

After a decade marked by working under a pseudonym in the porn industry to make ends meet, Rollin saw Fascination as an attempt to return to his roots. It’s based on Jean Lorrain’s  Un verre de sang (A Glass of Blood), a poem about rich people drinking the blood of bulls in order to cure anemia. It’s also a tribute to a French magazine that explored eroticism in art.

In 1905, a group of wealthy women waits for bulls to be slaughtered so that they can drink their supposedly curative blood.

A gang of thieves pursues Mark, who is trying to leave France for London with a bag of gold coins. He finds a secluded mansion in the mountains that is empty, save for two chambermaids, Elizabeth and Eva, who await the arrival of their Marchioness and her servants.

The women, who are lovers, aren’t afraid of Mark. Instead, they seem attracted to him. Eva eventually sleeps with the thief, making Elizabeth jealous to the point that she puts a gun in her mouth.

A shot rings out, but it is not Elizabeth’s death. The thieves have found where Mark is hiding and have begun shooting at the house. Eva goes out to give the men Mark’s gold. While they count it, a female thief demands her dress.

Eva makes love to one of the thieves before stabbing him, then wiping out the rest with a scythe. Once the film tastes blood, it picks up in intensity and purpose. Eva returns to find the woman who stole her white dress, now clad in black and carrying the giant bladed weapon. Single frame close-ups of their eyes, lips and blades show the difference between the women. While the thief was once in control and confident, now she is facing death. Her outstretched knife is tentative and finally drops as Eva laughingly decimates her, the former virginal white dress awash with blood as the camera pulls back from the drawbridge to show the carnage.

Soon, the Marchioness later arrives, whom Mark refers to as the grand danger. She tells him that death often takes the form of seduction (and Elizabeth had said that death itself would be coming). If Mark stays — and she know she will — he’ll be the only man there…except for Satan, of course.

Mark jokingly says, “Midnight! Satan! Death!” as he finds the situation very amusing. Mark tries to take her by force, as she intimates that he’d like to try, but she responds by biting his lip.

Four more women arrive, excited at the possibility of Mark being at their annual reunion. They go to meet him as Elizabeth and Eva light a room full of candles. Mark asks if it’s for the arrival of Death, but gets no answers.

As music plays, one of the women tells Mark that he is about to learn what seven women can do to one man. He takes the music from slow to fast, dancing with a near mania. Suddenly, he has the attention of every woman in the room, dancing with each of them one at a time. He is blindfolded and spun around until he has no idea where he is, laughing and seeking the touch of each woman as they begin to disrobe him. He staggers around the room, blind, seeking to touch each woman.

They’re playing a game, where if Mark can pick out the woman by touch, she can be his. Mark finds the Marchioness and tells her that he wants her to be his slave for fifteen minutes. She tells him to meet her in the study.

All of the women confront Elizabeth, who wants to save Mark as she feels something for him. The other women taunt her before handing out the costumes for midnight.

Mark meets the Marchioness, who undresses for him. He makes her get on her knees and teases her with a cigar. She rises and tells him that the fifteen minutes are over. He walks outside where he finds the body of the final thief, covered in blood. He presents it to the women, who are all wearing veils that barely cover their nudity. He demands to know their secrets and says that he belongs to the real world and their world.

The Marchioness tells Mark to go to the stables, where she has a horse waiting for him. Yet the stables are empty. Eva was waiting for Mark, but Elizabeth shoots her several times. Eva asks why, telling her that she loved her before dying. She crawls back to the house where the rest of the women converge on her and devour her.

Elizabeth and Mark hide in the stables, where he confesses that he loves her. She does not return that love and kills him. Then, she and the Marchioness walk into the sunrise.

Is Fascination a vampire movie? Maybe. It’s more the tale of a ritual, repeated year after year. It’s about how love and sex and madness can be intertwined and how fickle it can all be. It’s about man’s sexual power being laughable when faced with a powerful woman. “The blood cult is strange and bizarre. The love of blood is stronger than the body in which it flows,” says Elizabeth as she shoots Mark. “I never loved you, but what I liked about you was…” she trails off, eyes mad.

After his hit The Grapes of Death, it looked like Fascination would be a change of fortunes for Jean Rollin, lifting him from the porn gutter. Sadly, all of the screenings were canceled at the last minute and the film went from something everyone was dying to see to a film that no one could find. Again, Rollin would lose nearly all of his money and return to adult films.

That’s a shame because this is a film that’s literally brimming with dread, doom and otherworldliness. It starts slow, but by the end it really gets going. I hate to admit it, but this is my introduction to Rollin’s work and I plan on it being only the first.

In 2013, when the Alamo Drafthouse presented the uncut version of this film for the first time in the United States, they referred to it as an “unforgettable assault on reality.” Those words best describe what is otherwise an indescribable film.

But I’m going to try.

Maybe a recipe will help.

Take Chariots of the Gods, and some of Rosemary’s Mary, then a little bit of The Omen, throw it in a blender and then pour the whole thing down the sink.

No? Maybe a synopsis.

We start in Heaven, or somewhere very much like it, where Franco Nero (the original Django) is one of those space gods that Erich von Däniken wrote about. He tells the bald children who surround him that there was once a war between two aliens, one good and one bad. The bad one — who is either called Sateen or Zathaar — was defeated, but not before he slept with a whole bunch of Earthwomen. Cue the Book of Enoch in the Lost Books of the Bible. Or cue the Scientology myth of Lord Xenu. Or Xemu, because he has two different spellings, too.

Only one child is left — a young girl — and a vast conspiracy wants her mother to have another child — a brother this time — so they can mate. The Christ figure sends John Huston — yes, the director of The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen — and the bald children to a rooftop somewhere in Atlanta to stop this plot. To do that, the children become adult bad men and dance around a lot while Huston walks up and down the stairs to triumphant music. If you think I’m making that last sentence up, you’ve never been blessed with this movie.

Meanwhile, Lance Henriksen (Near Dark, Aliens) is Ted Turner, pretty much. His name is Raymond Armstead and he owns the Atlanta Rebels basketball team that plays at the Omni and is dating Barbara (Joanne Nail, Switchblade Sisters), who of course is the woman who has the seed of the gods inside her. Her daughter Katy is 8 years old and already using her powers to help the Rebels win their games. But that isn’t all the help Raymond is getting. The rich, powerful and ultra-secretive Zathaar cult control the world and are helping his team become winners. All he has to do is marry Barbara, knock her up and let their kids fuck. Hopefully, they have a boy, or Raymond is gonna have to get in the saddle all over again.

Raymond can’t even do that right and the leader of the bad guys, Mel Ferrer(The Antichrist and Eaten Alive!) is upset and ready to quit on Raymond. Barbara doesn’t want more kids and certainly doesn’t want another child. But who can blame her? Her daughter is one creepy little girl. Her daughter knows all about the conspiracy and begs her mom to get married so she can have a brother (and this is where, in person, I’d throw in “…to have sex with” but I’d use the f word). How creepy is Katy? Well, she kills a bunch of boys with her mental powers because they make fun of her while she ice skates. And then she accidentally shoots her mother at a birthday party. Yep, it’s as if The Bad Seed met Carrie!

Then, as all 70’s occult movies must, the stars of Hollywood’s golden age make appearances!

Glenn Ford, the actor, plays a cop that Katy curses out and uses hawks to make wreck his car!

Shelley Winters plays Barbara’s nurse who once had one of the space babies and killed it, but can’t bring herself to kill Katy! According to interviews, Winters really smacked around Paige Conner, the actress who played Katy!

Sam Peckinpah, the director (!), plays an abortionist who removes one of the space babies from Barbara after the conspiracy pays a bunch of things to artificially inseminate her. Turns out Peckinpah had trouble remembering his lines, which is why we never learn that he’s Barabara’s ex-husband! Then is he Katy’s dad? Who knows! His voice is even Peckinpah’s! They had to ADR all of his dialogue.

In response to the abortion, Katy shoves her mom through a fish tank. She also decides to throw her down the stairs, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane-style. And by throw her down the steps, I mean do it over and over and over again.

Meanwhile, John Huston is still going up and down stairs. Finally, they HAVE HAD ENOUGH (I like to emphasize that so you get the gist) and sent their John Woo-ian flock of doves to fight the hawks. And meanwhile, Mel Ferrer and all his men show up dead with black marks on their bodies.

And Katy? Well, as Huston tells us, kids can never be evil. She gets her head shaved and goes to space to meet Instellar Jesus Christ. The title comes up as insane music blares.

Writer/director/insane man Michael J. Paradise (Giulio Paradisi) also was in Fellini’s 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita. What inspired him to this level of cinematic goofiness? He was helped along by Ovidio G. Assonitis, whose resume includes writing Beyond the Door, Madhouse and Forever Emmanuelle before becoming the major stockholder and CEO of Cannon Pictures in 1990. That may explain some. But not all.

I know I often write things like “I don’t have the words to describe this” when I do these reviews — especially after I write a few hundred words all about said subject. But this is one time that that statement is not pure hyperbole. Just watch the trailer and prepared to lose your grasp on normalcy!

The Visitor defies the logic of good and bad film. It can only be graded on the is it an absolute film, ala Fulci or Jodorowsky. It is something to be experienced. You can watch this movie on Shudder.

In the biography of his life, director John Frankenheimer said that his alcohol problem had gotten so out of hand, he started to do work below his own standards. The movie that the director of The Manchurian Candidate, Black Sunday (the one with the blimp, not the one with the magical eyes and evil of Barbara Steele) and 52 Pick-Up picked as the one where he started to slide? 1979’s Prophecy…and that’s the film you’ll be reading about, so buckle up. One could argue that the slide went the whole way to the abortive (and that’s being charitable) The Island of Dr. Moreau, but since this issue is all about movies from 1979, let’s concentrate on the flick at hand.

Let’s start with the poster: “She lives. Don’t move. Don’t breathe. There’s nowhere to run. She will find you.” The ad copy and artwork that hyped Prophecy may be among the finest works of horror film art. I’ve been obsessed by it since I was a kid. I’d shoot glances at it while thumbing through issues of Creepy, Eerie and Famous Monsters. In fact, the second issue of Fangoria had a cover story and feature on the film and the photos alone are nightmarish. What’s even crazier is that this is a PG film. Don’t let that rating hold you back — it’s a definite mistake, The Baby. The image of a strange bear mutant embryo stuffed into a sack were too much for my seven year old mind to comprehend. I was both excited to see it…and totally afraid of it.

Billed as “the monster movie,” this film has a hell of a pedigree beyond Frankenheimer. It has an A-list cast, including Talia Shire (Rocky, The Godfather, Rad), Armand Assante (Little Darlings, Judge Dredd), Robert Foxworth (Falcon Crest, TV-movie The Devil’s Daughter), Richard Dysart (The Thing and Meteor) and Kevin Peter Hall as the Mutant Bear (Hall was THE guy for monsters, playing everything from Predators to Harry of Harry and the Hendersons and the monster that is pretty much a Predator in 1980’s Without Warning). Toss in a script from David Seltzer (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and The Omen series) and the film seemed poised for success.

The film starts with a gorgeous shot of lights bouncing off a river as a rescue team search for two lost men, only to be murdered by some unseen force. Cut to the stark light of day and we have a horrifyingly beautiful composition of their decimated corpses in the sun.

Cut to Dr. Robert Verne, working as a doctor in the tenements of the city, giving kids medical care. This scene is rife with that feeling 1979 gave you, that we were living in the end of the world. Verne feels like he isn’t making any difference, especially after hearing how the rats keep biting the kids. That’s why he decides to take a job with the Environmental Protection Agency (again, very 70s as is Foxworth’s reddish white dude fro and full beard. Sex symbols were…different at the time), which means heading up to a logging town in Maine and solving a dispute between the loggers and Native Americans (Wow, again, this movie is just rife with issues that today’s now generation is ready to tackle!).

Maggie, Verne’s wife, comes along. She’s pregnant but since he has no interest in kids, she is planning on just having an abortion (Do I need another parenthesis to shout out the 70s issues? Yes, I do.) and not telling him. We meet Travis, his kids Paul and Kathleen and paper mill director Bethel Isely.

Isely blames the missing rescue team and loggers on the Opies, or Original People (Native Americans). The accused have their own suspect: Katahdin, the spirit of the forest. We barely have time to process that before the Opies block our main characters path, leading to a battle between lumberjack Kelso and Opie leader John Hawks that ends with Hawks facing a chainsaw vasectomy. Cooler heads prevail, but Verne and Maggie are aghast at the violence in the woods.

What follows is a slow burn toward our big monster reveal, which was a huge secret at the time, as the film had tight security, barring even studio personnel from the set. Crew and actors had to sign NDAs that they would not reveal any elements of the story under any circumstances. A retired CIA agency supervised the whole shoot, only allow one camera for the official still photographer.

There’s a giant salmon snacking on a duck. An insane raccoon that attacks Verne. A gigantic tadpole. And of course, a litany of stillbirths, birth defects and people going crazy. Verne thinks mercury is the culprit, but it’s too late to save that lovely Nelson family we met earlier, who are attacked by Katahdin, who is revealed to be a female mutant bear that swats Paul into the rocks, killing him.

Of course, the loggers blame the Opies for this and we arrive at one of the real shocks of this film: upon going to the crime scene, two mutated cubs are discovered screaming and trapped in a fishing net. Beyond simple gore, this scene is just plain uncomfortably awesome to watch. It’s about this time that Maggie realizes that everything she has eaten is contaminated and her pregnancy is in danger. Man, nowadays they don’t even allow pregnant women to eat sushi. The 70s were a rougher, harder time.

Katahdin shows up just when it gets kind of boring and goes off, attacking everyone, sending them fleeing into the night. Soon, the mutant bear has pretty much wiped most of the cast off the face of the polluted earth one after another. Even that venerable staple of horror movies, the Magical Native American, can’t stop a mutated melted bear. Only Verne can, stabbing it again and again and again with arrows.

As the survivors fly away, the great shock of this film — it caused me nightmares for weeks — shows up. There’s a male bear in the woods and he wants revenge.

Sadly, he would never get the chance. Prophecy did well enough in theaters but isn’t remembered or sought out by many film lovers. Perhaps it’s because so much violence and gore was chopped out, a decision made by either the studio or Frankenheimer (depending on who is talking). Cut shots included a headless body, Isley getting his guts torn out and Maggie and Verne having sex. Even the original look for the monster (as seen on the posters) was made less frightening, as Frankenheimer wanted something that looked more like a bear.

If you’re looking for a message film — Native Americans good! Pollution bad! — you could do a lot worse than Prophecy. Through no fault of it own it remains a somewhat forgotten classic. The good news for you is that you can easily find it, making this one less film that needs a blu ray megabuck reissue that will further burden your wallet and/or credit card.

This article first appeared in the Drive-In Asylum 1979 Yearbook. You can buy a copy at https://www.etsy.com/listing/521153136/drive-in-asylum-special-1-1979-yearbook?ref=landingpage_similar_listing_top-6 or visit http://groovydoom.blogspot.com/ or hey, also visit https://www.facebook.com/pg/DriveInAsylum