Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #237 The Prophecy (1995)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m deep into a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.
Listening to a We Hate Movies episode on The Prophecy I found myself thinking, “Man, that movie sounds crazy. I would love to watch it and write about it.”
The great thing about having your own website, beyond the god-like power it affords you, is that you can write about whatever the hell you want to write about.
But it always helps if what you want to write about is also what you are professionally obligated to write about, if it fits snugly into an ongoing column’s conceit or a theme month.
So when a generous and much-appreciated patron asked me if I would write about all of Virginia Madsen’s movies for this column my immediate response was, “Great, now I have an excuse to write about The Prophecy.”
Of course Madsen has made many, many movies, several of which are objectively better than The Prophecy but ever since that We Hate Movies episode I’ve had The Prophecy on the brain.
So when the benefactor behind the Madsen series, and the Tawny Kitaen journey before it, offered me an opportunity to write about the many spooky movies Madsen has made for the Halloween season I jumped at the opportunity to write about The Prophecy.
Bear in mind, I was not intrigued by The Prophecy because the discriminating gents over at We Hate Movies raved about it as either a nifty, overlooked little sleeper or a so-bad-it’s-good camp classic.
We Hate Movies was pretty damned underwhelmed by The Prophecy despite a preposterously over-qualified cast full of ringers, an agreeably bonkers premise involving a war between heaven and hell and a wonderful performance by Christopher Walken as an evil angel.
The Prophecy is worth seeing for a scene where Walken’s evil angel holds court with some unsuspecting children and utters such delicious non-sequiturs as “Kevin! Have. Another mint on ME!” and “See ya, kids! Study. Ya math! Key to the universe!” in those deeply imitable Walken rhythms of his alone.
In The Prophecy Walken takes the perfect approach to the material. He alone seems to realize that a movie with Christopher Walken as an evil angel, Elias Koteas as a priest-turned-cop and Viggo Mortenson as the devil himself should be campy, goofy and fun.
Walken brings a light touch to what is otherwise a perversely somber endeavor with a dourness more befitting The Last Temptation of Christ, the last Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry.
The Prophecy was sold as a Christopher Walken vehicle but he’s only onscreen for about a half hour and doesn’t make his first appearance until about twenty-five minutes in.
Koteas leads a perversely star-studded cast as Thomas Dagget, a Priest who lost his faith and became a tough cop investigating a series of deaths involving corpses without eyes and all manner of other curious, otherworldly qualities.
Gabriel (Christopher Walken), meanwhile, swoops down to earth and quickly recruits the suicidal Jerry (Adam Goldberg) as his henchmen in his search for a “dark soul” that can be used as a weapon in the great war between good and evil.
This dark soul originally inhabits the corpse of a psychotic general until grunge angel Simon (Eric Stoltz, one of several Pulp Fiction alum in the cast) transports it into the soul of Mary (Moriah Shining Dove Snyder) a Native American girl via a soul-kiss that’s even creepier than it’s supposed to be.
The Prophecy casts Christopher Walken as an evil angel. It casts Elias Koteas a man-of-god-turned-crime-fighter. It casts Adam Goldberg as a suicidal man turned flunky for supernatural evil and Viggo Mortenson as the fucking devil. In a slightly less juicy and more thankless role, Virginia Madsen plays a nice lady teacher who helps protect Mary.
Though Walken isn’t in The Prophecy anywhere near as much as he should be, he nevertheless turns in a tour de force performance full of unforgettable moments, like when he enters a hospital looking for the desperately, fatally ill, and sneers insouciantly in disgust and annoyance at the charts of patients who are insufficiently sick for his purposes.
Walken plays Gabriel as a figure considerably darker and more evil than the devil himself, an arrogant misanthrope who derides human beings with souls as nothing more than talking monkeys.
The Academy-Award winning cult icon may just be doing his patented crazy Christopher Walken shtick but in the right context that can be an absolute blast. Walken is so much fun that the movie suffers every moment that he is offscreen.
Walken delivers a performance so big and theatrical it can be seen from neighboring galaxies but then Mortenson shows up deep into the film’s third act as the ultimate bad guy, the LITERAL devil and audaciously attempts to out-crazy Christopher Walken.
The future three time Academy Award nominee is bigger, more theatrical and more egregious in his scenery chewing than Walken. In the battle to determine who can be bigger and crazier everyone wins but by that point it’s too little, too late.
The Prophecy’s cold, dry execution comes perilously close to ruining a can’t miss premise. The minor cult film doesn’t realize all of its extraordinary potential to be both a legitimately good horror comedy or a deliriously awful cult romp but it realizes enough of that potential to be an agreeable enough time waster, particularly if you can’t get enough of Walken and his shenanigans.
Because Walken gets up to all manner of mischief and monkeyshines here and that part of the film at least is tons of fun.
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