I remember seeing previews for the Sci-Fi Channel premiere of Gregory Widen’s directorial debut The Prophecy (which, as of this writing, is his only feature director credit, although he did an episode of Tales from the Crypt) in the late 90s. It scared me a little, and I also remember being a little freaked out by the VHS cover, with Christopher Walken looming over figures in the desert, yellow eyes shining. He’s great in this, and when the movie works, it’s usually because of the inhumanity of his Archangel Gabriel, a kind of body language and erratic emphasis that’s one of the actor’s many specialties. Widen also wrote the film, having previously garnered some success for penning 1986’s Highlander as well as 1991’s firefighter action thriller Backdraft. As a horror fantasy, The Prophecy obviously borrows more from the former than the latter, once again featuring battles between immortal beings, ancient texts, and the grappling between Good and Evil. 

The film opens with narration from Simon (Eric Stoltz), an angel, as he recounts the events of the First War in Heaven, the story that we all know about a third of the angels being struck down from heaven because Lucifer rebelled in an attempt to become a god himself. What we don’t know is that there was a Second War, one that’s been in a stalemate since the first one, between those angels loyal to the Almighty and those led by Gabriel (Walken, as noted), who are throwing a cosmic temper tantrum over God’s preference for humans, as demonstrated by the latter’s possession of souls. In fact, because of this cold war, no soul has ever reached heaven in the history of mankind. As Gabriel later reveals, humans are much more skilled than angels in the areas of “war and treachery of the spirit,” and thus he and his lackeys are seeking out a deeply evil soul of a recently deceased war criminal, as his talent for warmaking could tip the scales in the balance of the rebels. Caught up in all of this is Thomas Dagget, a detective who, years earlier, saw a vision of angels at war during his final confirmation for the priesthood, causing him to abandon the faith. He’s called in when the body of one of Gabriel’s lieutenants, slain in an altercation with Simon, is found and autopsied, with strange results. For instance, when humans grow, their bones have natural striations that can be used to determine the age of a body, but this man’s bones have no such markings, as if they were created spontaneously in their current form; he also has the blood chemistry of an aborted fetus. 

Simon and Thomas meet briefly before the angel takes off to Arizona to dig up the grave of the recently deceased Colonel Hawthorne, from whose corpse he inhales the man’s dark soul. Knowing that Gabriel is hot on his trail, Simon sticks the soul inside of a young girl named Mary (Moriah Shining Dove Snyder) at the local reservation school, shortly before Gabriel arrives and kills him. Mary’s teacher Katherine (Virginia Madsen) starts to notice a change in the girl’s disposition as well as her declining health. Meanwhile, Gabriel searches for the soul hiding spot with the help of two undead lackeys: Jeffrey (Adam Goldberg), whose life was suspended by Gabriel in the moment of his suicide, and later Rachael (Amanda Plummer), who is caught in the moment of her death by cancer. The film makes its most interesting turn with the appearance of Lucifer (Viggo Mortenson), who doesn’t care all that much for the people caught in the middle but knows that a victory on Gabriel’s part will turn Heaven into Hell which, as he says, “is one hell too many.” 

This movie is messy. Widen has a strong eye for composition and the film has a style that’s unique, and he manages to craft some truly horrifying images, most notably quick flashes of the grisly results of the heavenly war with angels impaled on spears and rotting through Thomas’s visions (think the very brief splices of the terrors that had to be cut from Event Horizon to secure its R rating). There are also some fun things that he does with the mythology that, since he was basically crafting his own Bible fanfic and could make up the rules as he went along, can likely be accredited to him all the way. In particular, I love the way that every angel that we meet has a habit of “perching” on things — road barriers, fence posts, the backs of chairs. It’s like an unconscious habit for them to sit on their feet with their legs folded beneath them like birds, and it’s a clever bit of storytelling through body language. I also really liked the angel autopsy, as each of the things that’s revealed about the corpse is something that makes sense as a scientific oddity that would befuddle a coroner in the way that it’s similar to but not exactly like a human body. 

For the most part, the toying with of fantasy elements works. Lucifer’s reluctant (and ultimately self-interested) investment in preventing the villainous Gabriel from getting his way is good stuff. Although the inclusion of Jeffrey and Rachael is a bit superfluous (Jeffrey mostly serves the in-universe function of driving Gabriel around and handling all the human stuff and the narrative purpose of receiving exposition, and Rachael just replaces for the last fifteen minutes after Jeffrey when he dies), the whole slowly dying puppets angle is interesting. The conflict between Gabriel and the loyal heavenly guard is also clear. What doesn’t work is where it gets bogged down in all of Hawthorne’s soul stuff. We spend too much of the film with Thomas investigating who Hawthorne was (a Korean War general, war criminal, and apparent cannibal) just to establish that he has a truly awful talent for suffering and war, and it really doesn’t make a lot of sense that Simon would stick this McGuffin into a little girl other than because the narrative says he has to. It’s lucky that Lucifer turns up at the end to claim the soul once it’s exorcised from Mary via a Native American ritual (no tribe is ever named, nor is the ritual given a title either; it’s just the typical nineties “Magical Native American” trope), because otherwise I’m not really sure what his endgame was. It’s all a bit convoluted, to the film’s detriment. Its other problem is that, well, it’s just not very good. No one is giving a bad performance, there are some decently unique visual choices and interesting tableaux, but this is a 90s destined-for-VHS-cult-status movie that will forever be playing third banana to Candyman (which also featured Madsen) and The Crow, the sleepover flick for you and your goth best friend when those two (or The Craft, which released the following year) were already rented out on a Friday night. It’s available for streaming right now on Tubi … but only in Spanish. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond