*SPOILER ALERT*
(1979. dir: John Frankenheimer) Is it ancient Native American vengeance, sprung up red-clawed from myth? or grotesque mutation from mercury dumped into the waters by the white man's paper mill? Frankenheimer is coy on the subject of choosing. Indeed, why choose? Perhaps the denizens of the daimonic dimension make use of what gateways are available.
I love these old 70s horror things, love them for their flaws. I'm not talking about the greats, about the Exorcist. I'm talking about the cheese: the Fury, the Car, Motherlode, Burnt Offerings, and this. The pace is set at so easy an amble, the orchestral music so overbearing and lush, that a child today wouldn't recognize it as a horror film. When you get to the brutality and gore, it's doubly surprising.
It's an ecological showdown between the Indians and the loggers, the former represented by a thunder-browed Armand Assante, the latter by an amiable and avuncular Richard Dysart, both formidable actors who do very well under the circumstances. (To demonstrate the circumstances, I'll point out that the initial clash between the two groups involves a duel between an axe-wielding Indian and a logger sporting a chainsaw. I guess it must have looked good on paper.) To give Frankenheimer his due, there are some marvellous pieces of skill here. One scene in particular, in which our intrepid group hides from the beast in an underground tunnel, is especially masterful, his use of framing and silence and lighting. There is also a poetic murder in the mist, a dreamlike glimpse of the village elder being borne aloft by the gargantua. On the flipside, there is a notoriously risible bit in which the beast attacks a family camping and a boy zipped into a mummy-bag explodes in a cloud of feathers when it throws him with force against a rock. It's almost as if there were multiple directors involved, as if Frankenheimer lost interest and the project was taken over by a hack.
Our heroic lead is Robert Foxworth, a disillusioned do-gooder who set out to save the world and is growing cynical in his failed effort. Talia Shire is his cello-playing wife, the true lead, since we begin with her, share the secret of her pregnancy, and follow her emotional process more intimately than his. It is, in fact, her pregnancy which is the true heart of the movie, and it feels like a cheat that its story is never completed.
The local animals (in this far, far northern forest) who eat the mercury-poisoned fish are giving birth to monstrous hideosities. The Foxworth character has a key speech in which he describes the development of a fetus as going through marine, amphibious, reptilian and finally mammalian stages, and his revelation is that these monster-babies have been retarded at each stage, and so carry over traits from each. His wife, having tasted of the poisson maudit, listens in horror, realizing she has damned her unborn baby to an inhuman existence. The theme is not ignored, exactly, giving us particularly apt and eccentric images like the couple carrying a squalling mutato-bearcub, swaddled like an infant, as they are pursued by its fearsome and ursalike mutato-mater. Still, in context of horror films of the time, the fate of her child and her attitude towards it are the main issues, and that end is left dangling. What is growing within her womb? how will it emerge into the world, and what will happen then?
The seventies were obsessed with choices about mothering, childbearing, and the question of the "demon seed". Consider not just Rosemary's Baby and its many Z-class offspring, but It's Alive, the Brood, Demon Seed, the Manitou, the first two Alien films and their focus on gestation and motherhood, even Eraserhead. Prophecy (which is a misnomer; it should be called after its mythical daimon, the Katahdin) is very much linked onto that train of thought, but defaults any definite comment on it, prefering to stay within the safer realm of beasts attacking, men defending, and, sadly, all the Native Americans dying while many of the white men get to survive, probably to poison another river on another day.
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