Word: alien
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Alien is ugly in conception, but it achieves what it's after; Prophecy is an innocous shocker, dully made. Which is a surprise, because director John Frankheimer has made some wonderful thrillers; the least I expected was a little directorial style. Frankheimer keeps the killings relatively bloodless, but they're also flat and slightly rushed, lacking the witty camera set-ups or pungent, economical editing of a classic like Jaws. The baby mutants--popped little dragons--are rather cute, but they're straight out of Eraserhead. The big pig has no personality; at best, it suggests the nightmare...
...Alien and Prophecy have a common failing: they are scared stiff of stillness. There are no intentional laughs in either movie,and nobody smiles. The actors are too busy being realistic. And finally, the atmosphere of each becomes oppressive: the popcorn gets stuck in your throat. Existentially, Alien is more of a downer than Waiting for Godot. Beckett pins some hopes on the human spirit and personality; Alien presents people as walking red meat and pus for greedy lobsters...
...BUDGET summer shockers--Prophecy, alien, The Omen in its time--are all wrong: humorless, literal-minded disasters. Horror movies thrive on satire, wit, ghoulish irreverence (or else elaborately-stylized reverence, as in the Hammar films, to the point where it's funny). Or else lots of erotic overtones. (Alien had some, but they're mitigated by the film's frigidity. Prophecy is sexless.) The British can usually make funnier and more stylish horror films, because they're so good about being shocked: "A vampire you say? My word..." Here are a few of the most precious moments in horror history...
...reduce every conflict to black vs. white, good vs. evil--that's the point. But they're fantasies--they invoke the supernatural; they don't pretend that that's how it is in real life, the way John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movies do. You can't rehabilitate the alien or the zombies in Dawn-- you've got to blow them away. You don't have to blow away Vietnamese and have your audiences cheering it--unless, as in The Deer Hunter, you depict them as bloodthirsty aliens, which is a lie. (If anything, the Americans should have been depicted...
Campy, but so classy. Alien and Prophecy have no class. They are aimed at the huge, snorting, blood-soaked pigs we are, and not at the devilishly perverted highbrows we strive...