The Prophecy Trilogy

The Prophecy – 1995, Gregory Widen
A film that most people have never seen or even heard of, but that spawned four sequels (two were straight to DVD). The film that started it all off is one I highly recommend. Christopher Walken does his best Christopher Walken impression and gets all the best lines playing the Angel Gabriel, who is the villain of the piece. It’s a bit like the Keanu Reeves film Constantine with its Heaven vs Hell stuff, only with a better story and a better cast and lots of good ideas. Because it’s pre-digital it is far less reliant on special effects than similar films are nowadays. Well worth a watch.

The Prophecy 2 – 1998, Greg Spence
One of the reasons The Prophecy was so g, ood was that it had a conclusive, non-ambiguous ending that in no way paved the way for a sequel. The success of the original film was probably a bit of a surprise, and I suspect Christopher Walken had such a good time making the original that he was happy come back for more. This film takes all the good bits from the first film and re-does them with a painfully obvious continuation of the story. That said, I liked the first one so much that I was happy to see it all again. Brittany Murphy stars, doing her turn as a kooky supporting character that she did so well in a lot of films (Mark Dacascus vehicle ‘Drive’ springs to mind).

The Prophecy 3: The Ascent – 2000, Patrick Lussier
This one follows on from part II better than part II followed on from the original. The story is weaker than the others but it is much more light hearted. Only for Prophecy die-hards really.
It was between 1995 and 2000 that special effects went digital and filmmakers were able to get passable results with a limited budget, but I feel that early digital effects have dated worse than the last generation of non digital effects.