Prophecy (1979)

“That indian guy looks suspiciously like Frank Stallone,” My fiance noted quite accurately upon Armand Assante’s introduction. As you can infer, he’s quite italian looking, not in the least native.
And so it was that I was witness to Prophecy, which was not The Prophecy as I’d hoped, but one of the most horribly hilarous movies I’ve ever seen.
So yeah, with the Halloween holiday coming up, I set my DVR to record a ton of classics off Turner Classic Movies, and the decidedly less prestigious AMC. As a standard of comparison, TCM was running Hitchcock’s silent film “The Lodger” while AMC ran “Species II”
Now I don’t consider “Species” to be a classic, and the sequel you can probably infer is several magnitudes worse.
Anyway, This “Prophecy” doesn’t star Christopher Walken, but instead some weird beared guy, who works as an inner city doctor. He’s then called upon to help settle land dispute between some lumberjacks and native americans. So while this is I guess supposed to be a fish out of water story, he looks more out of place in the city than in the woods because of his odd Mountain Man looks.
At about the half hour mark I finally realize that “hey, this is the wrong damn movie” but we’re too far into it to turn back now, so we kept going.
Turns out the lumber company is poisoning the water with mercury. Mercury, which doesn’t make any sense to have in the water to assist in paper production. Mercury, which causes autism in infants but apparently gigantism in tadpoles and mutant horror in bears.
Bad Movies can take it from here. You especially want to see the exploding sleeping bag.
“Prophecy” is directed by John Frankenheimer, who helmed the political classic “The Manchurian Candidate” and the Ben Affleck bomb “Reindeer Games”
I’d have to say the mutant bear ranks somewhere below Affleck.