the bible

The Prophecy (1995)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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

The Book of Clarence (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Usually, movie distributors save uncategorizable headscratchers for late in the year, when they can compete for coveted positions on obscurity-pilled critics’ Best-of-the-Year lists for easy promotion.  In contrast, January dumping season is usually reserved for movies with gimmicky, single-idea premises originally scribbled on bar napkins.  After a couple grueling months of picking apart challenging, thorny Awards Contenders like The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, and Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s nice to kick back and unwind to inane novelties that can be neatly categorized and easily understood.  We should spend January watching Wyatt Russell swim laps in a haunted swimming pool. We should be watching Jason Statham shoot guns at nameless goons while dressed in a beekeeper costume. We should not be questioning the mysterious meaning behind a movie, and we definitely shouldn’t be questioning the mysterious meaning behind life.  That’s why Jeymes Samuel’s semi-ironic, semi-evangelical The Book of Clarence is such a strangely timed release for the first few weeks of the year.  A backpack rap modernization of the sword & sandal Biblical epic, it would be a tricky movie to market in any context, but TriStar Pictures’ impatience in not saving it at least until Easter feels like an admission of defeat.  The movie’s own distributor doesn’t really know what to do with Samuel’s low-key religious epiphany, and I’m not entirely sure what to do with it either.

That tonal & thematic ambiguity does work in its favor, though.  The Book of Clarence is not especially great, but it is Interesting and difficult to parse, which is more than you can say in favor of most contemporary “faith-based media.”  You can tell this isn’t the hip-hop equivalent of God’s Not Dead PureFlix propaganda as soon as LaKeith Stanfield appears as a crucified Christ figure in the opening seconds, just before the clock is dialed back to his Ben Hur-style chariot race with a badass Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor).  The Book of Clarence casually flirts with blasphemy throughout its runtime, even though it’s ultimately a loving message to the Believers in the crowd.  Stanfield stars as Clarence, an atheist contemporary of Jesus who believes the proclaimed messiah to be a conman magician, since he has never experienced one of His miracles first-hand.  Out of an act of financial desperation (and a pointed fuck-you to his twin brother, Doubting Thomas), Clarence is determined to cash in on the local phenomenon of Jesus’s popularity any way he can.  He starts by attempting to angle his way into Christ’s inner circle as “The 13th Apostle,” then eventually shifts gears to repeating His conman playbook by declaring himself “The New Messiah.”  The scheme blows up in his face, attracting both the attention of the white Roman officers who brutally police his community and the attention of Jesus Christ, who gradually wins over Doubting Clarence as a reluctant follower.

If there’s any overt, recognizable mission in Samuel’s screenplay, it might just be in making the world and characters of the Gospels relatable to a modern audience.  Clarence and his friends are just normal everyday guys from “the cobblestones” (i.e., “the streets”), getting by selling ditch weed to the nightclub and opium den patrons of ancient Jerusalem.  They’re depicted as laidback stoners who chain-smoke blunts to high-minded funk & hip-hop sound cues, but a lot of that hipster posturing is undercut by dialogue that refers to them as “highfalutin nincompoops,” among other old-timey turns of phrase.  There’s a distinctly Black take on the narrative of Jesus and the Apostles’ outlaw status under the oppressive eye of Roman soldiers, culminating in a police-brutality execution of an innocent man outside a nightclub, recalling far too many real-life news stories from recent years.  What’s less distinct is what the movie is trying to say about Clarence’s relationship with Faith.  He eventually emerges from his Biblical trials as a follower of Christ, but in a confused way that makes a distinction between “knowledge” vs “belief” in his path away from atheism – the kind of bullshit intellectualism that inspires people to say “overstand” instead of “understand”.  I appreciate that Clarence’s personal salvation is mostly found in his rejection of his once selfish ways, at one point sacrificing his personal freedom to free an army of slaves he has no personal connection to.  I just can’t quite figure out the reason why his story has to mirror the exact Stations of the Cross that marked Jesus’s ascent, except maybe that the script was originally written with Jesus as the main character and was considered a little too playfully blasphemous in its initial rough draft.

Maybe all of this not-quite-blasphemous modernization of the Jesus narrative would make more sense to me if I were successfully raised Christian.  Maybe I’m too much of a first-act Doubting Clarence to fully understand where the third-act Knowing Clarence fits in the grander theological debate outside this movie’s permitters.  Either way, I do think the film’s odd sincerity and thematic confusion are ultimately beneficial to its overall memorability & entertainment value.  It easily stands out as one of the most interesting wide-release novelties that hit multiplexes this month, which is impressive considering that it’s retelling the most often repeated & reprinted story of all time while competing with a horror movie about a killer swimming pool.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Salesman (1969)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Maysles Brothers’ door-to-door Bible salesmen documentary Salesman (1969)

00:00 Welcome

05:09 Triangle of Sadness (2022)
12:00 Heavenly Creatures (1994)
14:00 Skinamarink (2023)
20:22 Glass Onion (2022)
22:32 Luminous Procuress (1971)

29:42 Salesman (1969)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Garden (1990)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

Derek Jarman’s process for creating the look of his 1990 experimental feature The Garden was to put the film through an exhausting gauntlet of format transfers. Shot on super-8, then recorded to video, before finally being printed on 35mm film, the physical shape of The Garden had been put through the ringer to achieve its deliberately scuzzy, highly color-saturated patina. The general effect of the film on the audience is much the same. Non-narrative, mostly dialogue-free, and constantly shifting in both mood & technique, the film feels more like a process meant to break its audience down than it does a piece of creative entertainment. It opens as a vibrant, playful experiment in overlapping visions of homoromantic tableaus & Biblical Christian iconography, but its titular Edenic tone is gradually soured into a somber, morbidly violent affair that loses all of its initial energy to disorganized doom & gloom. It’s exhausting, purposefully so, and it’s easy to leave the film feeling just as worn out as its imagery was by the time it reached its final form.

My assumption is that Jarman intended The Garden’s soul-deep exhaustion to be a kind of diary of his own emotional state in the early 90s. Suffering from a series of AIDS-related health crises at the time of production (a sign of declining health that would eventually end his life just a few years later), Jarman filmed this disjointed series of Biblical tableaus & scenes of homophobic violence around the bleak exteriors of his coastal home in Dungeness, England. Self-described early in the proceedings as a tour though a “wilderness of failure,” the film’s backslide from paradisiac peace into morbid atonement serves as a kind of eulogy to the loss of an entire queer generation to a single virus, one which would eventually claim the filmmaker himself. We open with James Bidgood-esque visions of queer love & harmony (similar to Todd Haynes’s contemporary work in Poison), but the onscreen couple being depicted is eventually arrested, beaten, and shamed into disorder & dissolution. Religious imagery like a lynched Judas dressed as a leather-clad punk shilling credit cards, a young Tilda Swinton appearing as a Madonna figure hounded by paparazzi, and old women playing wine glass tones as the twelve apostles at the Last Supper interrupt this reverie, until it finally sours into an official funeral for the real-life dead in Jarman’s familial circle. The film can be occasionally beautiful, but it’s pretty fucking grim on the whole.

As an aesthetic object, The Garden is wonderfully exciting in its stabs of surreal shot-on-video era imagery. Its experiments in Ken Russellian green screen fuckery in which the entire sky is supplanted with flowers & other poetic, Polaroid-grade images are especially wondrous. The film also clearly has a sense of humor, despite its overall descent into despair, often breaking for absurdist musical numbers – such as a bargain bin music video for the showtune “Think Pink” from Funny Face. I don’t know if it’s the kind of film I’d recommend watching at home, though, where smartphones & other distractions are readily available. Even seeing it digitally restored in a proper theatrical environment (thanks to Zeitgeist’s summer-long queer cinema series Wildfire), I struggled to stay awake for the final 20-minute stretch. Not only is the film deliberately draining its trajectory from Eden to funeral service, it also suffers from the same attention-level difficulty that many feature-length works from directors who mostly work in short films suffer, the same exhaustion that tanks a lot of Guy Maddin’s films. As interesting as each homoerotic image, Biblical tableau, or outbreak of bigoted violence may be in isolation, they never really congeal as a cohesive, unified collection.

Jarman was at least aware of how miserable & patience-testing The Garden would be for his audience. The opening introduction in his woefully sparse narration includes the invitation, “I want to share this emptiness with you.” By the closing sequence wherein Tilda Swinton’s Madonna figure conducts a memorial for the homoromantic Eden lost over the course of the picture (a quiet ceremony involving cheap paper lanterns), I definitely felt that emptiness to some extent. It wasn’t the most pleasant or even the most clearly decipherable feeling to leave a movie theater with, but it was effective nonetheless. If you ever find yourself braving this “wilderness of failure” to “share this emptiness” with Jarman, just go into the journey armed with patience & a willingness to feel hopelessly miserable by the end credits. An experimental art film dispatch from the grimmest days of the AIDS crisis will apparently do that to you.

-Brandon Ledet