Linkshoch Wonderful Movie

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Leoni Haney Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

moonspinner55 For anyone still doubting the cruelty of show business, consider this tacky thriller was directed by John Frankenheimer, once an A-list filmmaker of merit reduced in 1979 to making a monster movie. Tenement doctor accepts a government job easing tensions in the forests of Maine, where lumber czars are taking land away from the Indian tribe; meanwhile, toxic waste attributed to the business has created its own rampaging monster, which looks like a melting grizzly bear and walks upright like a man. Depressing, distress-laden nonsense. One figures screenwriter David Seltzer had to be kidding; he's so heavy-handed with his messages, he even gives the doctor a pregnant wife afraid to tell her husband of her condition (he thinks there's enough people in the world already!). Good actors Robert Foxworth (looking a bit like Grizzly Adams himself), Talia Shire and Armand Assante are wasted. Assante, the stern, solemn mouthpiece for the Native-Americans, fights everybody in his path and gets kicked in the crotch for his trouble. Seltzer seems to be asking, "Who's worse, the lumber lunkheads or the beast in the forest?" Save a kick for Seltzer, who must have penned this for the paycheck. * from ****

Sam Panico The film starts with a gorgeous shot of lights bouncing off a river as a rescue team search for two lost men, only to be murdered by some unseen force. Cut to the stark light of day and we have a horrifyingly beautiful composition of their decimated corpses in the sun.Cut to Dr. Robert Verne, working as a doctor in the tenements of the city, giving kids medical care. This scene is rife with that feeling 1979 gave you, that we were living in the end of the world. Verne feels like he isn't making any difference, especially after hearing how the rats keep biting the kids. That's why he decides to take a job with the Environmental Protection Agency (again, very 70s as is Foxworth's reddish white dude fro and full beard. Sex symbols were…different at the time), which means heading up to a logging town in Maine and solving a dispute between the loggers and Native Americans (Wow, again, this movie is just rife with issues that today's now generation is ready to tackle!).Maggie, Verne's wife, comes along. She's pregnant but since he has no interest in kids, she is planning on just having an abortion (Do I need another parenthesis to shout out the 70s issues? Yes, I do.) and not telling him. We meet Travis, his kids Paul and Kathleen and paper mill director Bethel Isely.Isely blames the missing rescue team and loggers on the Opies, or Original People (Native Americans). The accused have their own suspect: Katahdin, the spirit of the forest. We barely have time to process that before the Opies block our main characters path, leading to a battle between lumberjack Kelso and Opie leader John Hawks that ends with Hawks facing a chainsaw vasectomy. Cooler heads prevail, but Verne and Maggie are aghast at the violence in the woods.What follows is a slow burn toward our big monster reveal, which was a huge secret at the time, as the film had tight security, barring even studio personnel from the set. Crew and actors had to sign NDAs that they would not reveal any elements of the story under any circumstances. A retired CIA agency supervised the whole shoot, only allow one camera for the official still photographer.There's a giant salmon snacking on a duck. An insane raccoon that attacks Verne. A gigantic tadpole. And of course, a litany of stillbirths, birth defects and people going crazy. Verne thinks mercury is the culprit, but it's too late to save that lovely Nelson family we met earlier, who are attacked by Katahdin, who is revealed to be a female mutant bear that swats Paul into the rocks, killing him.Read more at bandsaboutmovies.com/2017/06/30/prophecy-1979/

Alien_Zombie This film had the potential to be a rare echo-horror that actually tackled the subject of men tempering with nature. It was apparently inspired by a real environmental disaster in Japan and since it was directed by John Frankenheimmer, I was genuinely intrigued to check out this film that I had been dismissing for so long mainly because of the infamous exploding sleeping bag scene.It starts out nicely with a violent sequence that proceeds to set up the main characters and plot; Native Americans are demonstrating against loggers working on a paper mill and taking away their land. The protagonist is a doctor who is called to the affair as an adviser and soon finds out that the plant is poisoning the water, the fish and the people who live of the land. To make matters worse there's something in the woods feeding on loggers and campers.Now, I know this is a creature feature and the monster deserves a fair amount of screen time. It is kept in wraps throughout the film, making up for some genuinely suspenseful scenes. At first it's a mere side effect of the much bigger tragedy that the land and people are suffering. But by the end it takes over the movie, turning it into a gore fest and depriving it of its original atmosphere. All the subplots are dropped, characters vanished and the movie abruptly ends.All in all, as far as echo-horror goes this is one of the most decent and fans of b movies will certainly be entertained. More stuff to look out for is the gorgeous Victoria Racimo, a young Armand Assante, those adorable mutated bear cubs and of course, the exploding sleeping bag scene.

miles kolehmainen I give it 6/10, well more like 6 1/2. I liked it. The acting was great and so were the special effects. It was a very creepy movie. My favorite scene was either the truck scene or the lake scene. Its to bad that it was overshadowed by Alien(1979), though. In my a pinion it is VERY worth seeing. There were side plots and character development throughout the whole film and with tension building, it was very suspenseful. For the time, the effects were good and yes, very convincing. And then there was the hilarious exploding pillow scene, just about the only thing corny in this movie. Besides that, it was surprisingly good. The script was also good, especially when supported by quality acting and great cinematography. The plot was also pretty interesting. To sum it up it was a quality horror flick from a time when by our standards, quality was harder to come by.