Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.
There’s a part of me that wonders why, when a movie is about to get religiously freaky, we’re always going to be dealing with the Catholic Church. It’s as if someone somewhere decided that Lutherans and Baptists don’t get possessed or have to deal with demonic forces. I’m guessing that a great deal of this comes from The Exorcist, a film that is still exerting a great deal of religious and spiritual influence over demon-infested movies. It’s something that comes up over and over again, though—if you need to get rid of a demon, you have to go Catholic. If you’re going to get possessed, you’re probably Catholic, too.* That’s very much the case with The Prophecy.
Boiled down to its base essence, The Prophecy is the story of an almost-priest turned cop named Thomas Dagget (Elias Koteas). On the verge of taking his vows as a priest, Thomas is overwhelmed by a vision of the fabled war between angels—the one that is far more a part of Milton than scripture. Unable to continue, Dagget becomes a cop. He encounters a case one day that seems to not just touch on the supernatural, but to be fully enveloped in it. A body is discovered that is hermaphroditic, has no eyes, no signs of bone growth, and blood chemistry similar to that of a fetus. Of course, this is actually an angel, in this case put down by another angel named Simon (Eric Stoltz). This body also possesses an ancient hand-written Bible that includes an unknown chapter of Revelation that speaks of a second war in heaven.
