THE PROPHECY II
Not as good as the original, but, well, duh!

  After the first viewing of this, I came away with a smile - not one of great pleasure, for the movie wasn't really all that good, but one of relief, because it wasn't that bad either.  A straight-to-video sequel to a good theatrically-released genre film?  At the time, that set off warning bells.  (these days, less so, for some reason)

The Prophecy II does a number of things wrong and the filmmakers made some poor decisions, but there's also a lot that's right here, most of all the understanding of what made the first movie work so well.  Sure, it's not pulled off half as well here, but it's nice to see that it was done as well as it was.

It's a few years later, and that war between the angels rages on - yeesh, they're like cats and dogs up there.  Thomas (played by Elias Koteas in the first film, here, Bruce Abbott), the guy who dropped out of seminary to become a cop, has now quit the force to become a monk.  Yeesh, pick a job.  Satan (no idea who plays him here for all of his one line; Viggo Mortensen is missed) decides that Hell isn't big enough for him and his most ambitious tenant, the archangel Gabriel (Christopher Walken), so he lets him out.  And meanwhile, the angel Danyel (Russell Wong) is chosen to impregnate a human to produce a Nefilim, which is, like...oh, read Genesis 6, see if you can make more sense out of it than I can.

This human is a Los Angeles nurse played by Jennifer "Flashdance" Beals and her big, puppy-dog eyes, and within days, she's in her second trimester.  Gabriel, who still can't drive, gets himself a thrall in the form of Brittany Murphy, and heads out to take care of this pesky Nefilim problem.

Glenn Danzig is here too, playing one of Gabriel's minions, Samayel.  I had to check the closing credits and then rewind to the right scene to make sure it was him - he gets two lines and about forty-five seconds of screen time.  Returning from the original (for one funny scene) is Steve Hytner as the coroner who's tired of seeing angel corpses disappear on the job.

So, yeah - anybody who didn't see the first film is gonna need a tour guide to get through the first half hour of this.  Or maybe not - hell, the first film did the same thing, refusing to mention that anybody's an angel for quite a while.  Story-wise, it works - as was the case with the original, it's really rare that a horror movie is about ideas, and while this isn't quite as fresh (and indeed, the ideas are more scarce), it's nice to see that it didn't become a parody, or a gorefest, or whatever else happens when people run out of ideas.

Oh, there are a few moments which'll make you wonder.  Gabriel takes a cop's gun and asks Izzy to show him how to use it (which resulted in the biggest laugh I've had in weeks), but if he doesn't even know how to use it, how would he even know what it's for?  How did Gabriel know that the silent alarm tripped at the church was Danyel's doing?  And since the first film established that angels have both male and female genitals, ladies, if you were bedding down with some hunky guy and you noticed that he had both kinds of plumbing downstairs, wouldn't that about be the time you'd tell him about your headache?

Despite these curious lapses, the story's pretty good, sticking to the theological-Terminator ideas of the original.  And the dialogue has a number of memorably larger-than-heaven-and-hell pronouncements ("I sang the first hymn when the stars were born. And, long ago, I announced to a young woman, Mary, who it was she was expecting. On the other hand, I've turned rivers into blood, kings into cripples, cities into salt. So I don't think that I have to explain myself to you.").  Unfortunately, there are also lines which are a little on the cheesy side (Izzy reaches for an apple in Eden, and Gabriel says "Don't eat that.  Trust me."), and some which I can't even tell if they're jokes ("Have you been [to Heaven]?  It's PARADISE!").

The performances are mostly good.  Beals mostly speaks with her eyes, which are irresistible if you're as helpless before the power of puppy-dog eyes as I am.  Walken is maybe a little TOO cheeky here, but he still captures the menace and megalomania of Gabriel that he did in the previous film.  Wong is wooden as hell and a crashing bore, but the real treasure here is Brittany Murphy, who you right remember as the girl who got the big makeover in Clueless (she also does the voice for Luanne in King Of The Hill).  She's very funny, but sympathetic (though dangerously close to pitiable) as the attempted suicider who finds that if she wants to die, she's gonna have to earn it.  And it helps that she's adorable; yeah, she's all in black all the time with eyeliner running down her face and she wishes she were dead, but she lights up the screen every time she's on.

Coming pretty close to getting a theatrical release, The Prophecy II unfortunately went straight to video, which is a shame for even a rather so-so movie like this when crap like I Still Know gets splashed on every screen.  Double's the pity, for it's a fine-looking film, one that would probably have played better on the big screen; this is one of the only movies I've ever seen which makes L.A. look halfway interesting, and the depiction of Eden is quite unlike any I've seen before.

Written by Matt Greenberg and Greg Spence and directed by Spence, The Prophecy II isn't all that hot, and the absence of Gregory Widen (who wrote and directed the original) is keenly felt.  But still, I'd have to recommend it to fans of the original, if only so they can judge for themselves.  I think they're working on a part 3.  I wouldn't say I'm excited at the prospect, but it would have taken a far worse first sequel to douse my curiosity for a second.

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