PROPHECY (1979)
I didn't notice an actual prophecy in this movie

  No, this isn't the "war in Heaven fought on Earth" angel-bashfest with Christopher Walken.  This is the 1979 mutant-bear movie, a shade less ambitious of a project.

For some reason, every time I read some reference to how many horror movies were released in 1979, three movies are always mentioned: Alien, Dawn Of The Dead, and Prophecy.  Why Prophecy?  Niether particularly big-budget for a genre, nor respected or a big hit like the other two...maybe it was hyped up at the time, I dunno ("From the writer of The Omen!  From the director of...uh...The Manchurian Candidate!").  But there it is, Prophecy, the mutant-bear movie, always mentioned alongside those two.

Robert Foxworth stars as a slum-investigating big-city environmental protection guy (with marital difficulties, natch) who is called in to Maine, where Indian conservationists and logging companies are waiting for a resolution to, well, you figure it out.  Now, loggers are disappearing, and Whitey is pointing the finger right at...well, it's not at the giant mutant grizzly bear.  After quite a bit of time, they figure out just what it is that's eating these poor guys, and chances are, it's not at the giant plastic fish that this guy saw eat a duck in the local lake, or the giant tadpole that looks like an epileptic beaver. (okay, I suspected the tadpole)

Talia Shire plays this guy's wife, and Armand Assante's here too, playing an Indian fella with an organization who calls themselves the Opies (or O.P.'s, for Original People), winning high marks in my book towards being the least Indian-looking guy (Irish-Italian) in an Indian role.  He gets to have an axe-vs.-chainsaw duel against an angry logger.  (I don't know about you guys, but in such a battle, I'd put my money on the guy with the axe, unless he was an idiot)

I'm not sure why this movie needed a giant mutant GRIZZLY bear, since there aren't any in or near Maine; well, there aren't any giant crocodiles in or near Maine either but that didn't stop Lake Placid, did it?  Maybe the croc and the bear are poker buddies. The explanation for the mutation (it "freezes" parts of the fetus at earlier evolutionary stages) sounds like total hogwash, but hell, I'm not a geneticist, what do I know?

Anyway, this giant mutant bear basically looks like a slimy brown Michelin Man, and sounds like about what you'd expect.  It does provide us with some amusing moments of carnage, like how it whacks one poor fool trying to hop away from it in his sleeping bag (shaking head), causing him to fly back like a line drive, hit a rock, and explode!  More movies need people who explode from high-velocity impacts with stationary objects.

Director John Frankenheimer goes for a few things which might have worked better in a less silly movie, like one very quiet scene where the cast hides from the bear, trying hard to stay quiet, while hearing the quietly distant screams of a colleague meeting an unhappy end.  But it doesn't work.  The climactic man-on-monster fight (resolved by what appears to be a simple stab wound), doesn't work either.  And it has to be said that the post-climactic "Oh no, it's STILL alive!" is the most pedestrian and unimaginative take on this cliché that I've ever seen.

The box for this movie proclaims it to be Prophecy: The Monster Movie, I suppose to avoid confusion with Prophecy: The Sugar-Free Coffee Sweetener.  Lots of obnoxiously cheerful classical and disco music, but at least you learn a little about paper mills, which I hope is more reliable information than that "evolutionary fetus" thing.

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