The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000)

So we finally come to the end of the original run of "The Prophecy" series with "The Prophecy 3: The Ascent." I can't say my expectations we exceedingly high for this one, despite the intriguing ending of "The Prophecy II" and the return of Christopher Walken for his last outing as Gabriel. I guess at this point I'm just expecting a steady decrease in quality as sequels continue. That's probably a healthy attitude to have.

Were my lowered expectations required for this one? Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that it wasn't as bad as I had feared. At the very least, it didn't make me mad while watching it. Most of the time. The bad news is that the only reason it wasn't as bad as I feared was because I was expecting something along the lines of "The Touch of Satan," only without Mike Nelson making it hilarious. So anything would have been a step up from that.

That may be a little harsh, to be perfectly honest. It's not that "The Prophecy 3" was a train-wreck, it's just that the train made an uneventful trip across the country without any major delays or problems. It arrived at it's destination on time, and nearly every passenger slept for the majority of the journey. And when they're asked by relatives waiting at the station "How was your trip?" they will say "It was fine. They had good sandwiches at the food bar." That's the level of enthusiasm I have with this thing. It's right up there with the inane small talk you're forced to make in polite company you can't swear in front of. True, the train didn't go off the rails, but at least that would have been more interesting.

Shockingly, no. Not even this bit of randomness makes for an entertaining film.

If you couldn't tell by that tenuous analogy, the problem with this film is that it was not very memorable. It's only notable for how bland it was, and the fact that I can use the word "bland" to describe a movie starring Christopher Walken is probably the biggest offense of all. And to my surprise, one of the biggest reasons for it being bland is a direct consequence of the ending of "The Prophecy II," which I was a fan of. But I'll get back to that in a bit. For now just remember that Christopher Walken is no longer a powerful angel.

The third film picks up about 18 years after the end of the second one. At the end of that film, Gabriel was turned into a human by either God or Eric Roberts (it was hard to tell), as punishment for his hubris and betrayal. In the time since then, he's learned how to drive, learned to kind of like humanity, and has learned how to grow hair like that witch in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves." So he's just chilling, enjoying being a human. He has also been (kind of) looking after Danyael (Dave Buzzotta), the human/angel child from the end of the second movie. His mother Valerie, the main character from the that film, has died in the time between after a seemingly random mob burned down their house, leaving her dead and him unscathed since he's impossible to kill unless you remove his heart, being half angel.

Now we find that the forces of heaven are still at war, and they once again need an ace in the hole to turn the conflict. Enter the fray Zophael (Vincent Spano), an angel who's loyalty is obviously to the side of "Kill All Humans," but whose motivations I never really got apart from "He's the bad guy." From what I gather he's attempting to resurrect Pyriel, the Angel of Genocide, who will arise to eradicate mankind. Pyriel was the angel who lead God's army against Lucifer in the first war. How Pyriel died, how he has risen, who if anyone is responsible for that, why he is now on the side of the rebel angels, why they never tried this before if he's so powerful, and why apparently only Danyael can stop him is left completely unexplained, at least for as much as I understood the plot here.

Just a couple simple questions, here, buddy. Who are you? What are you doing? How did you get here? And why is this the first I've heard of you?

So what it all boils down to is that Danyael goes to the desert to stop Pyriel, while Zophael kidnaps Danyael's girlfriend Maggie, lies to her that Pyriel's resurrection is a good thing, and gets her to give him a ride to try and stop Danyael from stopping Pyriel. So much like the other two films, "The Prophecy 3" is a chase movie featuring an angel being chauffeured around in a car out to the middle of nowhere by someone who hates their guts. Says something for consistency, I guess.

And while it was kind of a neat thing that angels in this series can't drive cars since it's just not their thing, a pretty big question I had since the first film has to be addressed at some point here: Why don't the angels fly? They have wings. I don't know where the angels hide them under their black trench coats, but I've seen them. Wouldn't flying be much faster than driving? Why is Zophael even running after Danyael when they're on foot? Danyael doesn't have wings. Zophael does. If you want to stop him, just fly and catch up to him. Whatever. Stupid nitpick, I know, but it's still irritating to me.

In the background doing essentially nothing throughout all this is Gabriel, who just drives around in his convertible. And then he stops by that diner from the first film and orders a big breakfast. At least I understood that bit, although there's probably a deleted scene somewhere with a prophecy about whether he was going to order the buttermilk or blueberry pancakes.

"And lo! it was foretold that he of Doc Brown hair and saggy face would feast upon the Grand Slam and a pot of half-caf." GEN 15:27

And finally, we reach the end of the movie. Danyael confronts Pyriel in a showdown that had the potential to be cool and visually interesting. But unfortunately it winds up seeming more like a fighting game tutorial teaching you how to do your finishing move for as one sided as it is and for as long as it lasts, while looking like the background glitched out and was just solid black. And then, because that wasn't unsatisfying enough, Danyael is literally saved by a bolt of lighting out of the sky, sent directly by God to help Danyael defeat Pyriel.

What.

Well, if God always had the capacity to do that, then why in the name of holy crackers didn't he do that from the get-go? And you can't tell me that old "His ways are mysterious" story because that makes no sense. They say at the end of the movie that Pyriel's defeat signals the end of the war. If striking Pyriel down was always an option, why go through the whole rigamarole of thousands of years of horrible conflict and countless deaths and destruction? What an ass!

And you can't tell me that humanity had to be the ones to do it because Danyael is not fully human, and even if he was, they didn't because at the end God strikes down Pyriel anyway. I'm not even going to get too into the issue of no human soul reaching heaven before that point because of this conflict. But I'm just saying that when you consider that, according to the mythology, God went through all that trouble to send Jesus down to absolve humanity of its sins, only to have another easily fixable situation arise to throw a wrench into the whole plan, it kind of makes God look either lazy, incompetent, or like a big jerk. But that's just me.

It makes him seem less like a divine creator and more like a crappy roommate who never does anything. He never takes out the trash, never cleans the dishes, never buy groceries, never walks the dog, and always leaves his excess weed trimmings all over the living room table. And then one day he takes down a phone message for you in overly exacting detail and expects that to make up for the time he left a bowl of mac n' cheese in the sink for two weeks until it crusted over and attracted ants.

"Dude, come on. I left a post-it note on the fridge. You're welcome, by the way. Hey, could you give me a ride to and from work tomorrow? They got me working the night shift. I need to be there at 3 AM. Thanks, bro. You can pick me up at 10."

That's always been my biggest issue with this series. The story makes absolutely no sense, and I seldom follow the plot while watching it. It's only afterwards when I hop on Wikipedia and read the synopsis that I say to myself "Is THAT what was going on here? Dang, religion makes stuff dumb and confusing." I say that without trying to be offensive to anyone, but you can't argue that the insane amount of contradictions, self-fulfilling prophecies and nonsense explained with the catch-all "God is mysterious" excuse does not make for a very cohesive narrative. This is doubly so when one does something stupid like apply logic to something that is by its very nature illogical.

At this point I'd like to return, finally, to what I was saying earlier about what I felt was the biggest issue with "The Prophecy 3," which was what they did with Christopher Walken's character. The worst offense this movie did was to take Gabriel's powers away and make him a good guy. It's not until you've seen a movie in this series without the madcap antics of crazy, evil Walken that you realize how important that is to the entertainment value of these films. Let's be honest, these were never fantastic movies, but the character of Gabriel was such a memorable badass that he made the first films worth watching by himself alone.

Now what do we have? Gabriel has been relegated to being a side character who doesn't do anything because he can't do anything. He can't even offer assistance in a fight apart from running into someone with his car, which he does, but after that he immediately gets his ass handed to him by Zophael, who doesn't kill him for the sole reason that he's so pathetic that it's not worth either his time or energy. And Gabriel just sits there and smiles like he's managed to accomplish something by becoming meeker than Zophael when he used to be the Angel of Death.

Oh yeah. Serene and contemplative. That's how I like my Christopher Walken. I also like to garnish my pizza with a single saltine cracker.

It's not that Gabriel's redemption is a bad character arc, because it's not. It's just not something I'm interested in seeing in this film. Or at least they way it was done here. Had I been in charge of the script I would have kept Gabriel human, but he'd still be attempting to eradicate humanity by resurrecting Pyriel. Had he been the villain instead of Zophael the plot could have been nearly the same, and his redemption could have been slowly building throughout until the end, when he could fully realize the error of his ways. That way his character development could have actually been seen during the film as opposed to off screen between movies.

Honestly there wasn't a good thing I can say about anyone else in the cast, either. Christopher Walken is wasted, Dave Buzzotta is a poor man's Edward Furlong, and Vincent Spano does his best to come off like Gael Garcia Bernal, but again it's just not working that well. Although Spano isn't honestly that bad, especially when he is forced to act next to the worst actor in the film, Kayren Butler as Danyael's girlfriend. She reminded me a bit of Shannon from "Lost," only with less talent than even Maggie Grace and the bizarre ability to seemingly teleport in and out of scenes at random due to the power of bad script writing and confusing editing.

And by the way, any movie that casts Brad Dourif as a crazy person and kills him off after 5 minutes and about 3 lines can officially kiss my ass. I don't care if there's a scene later where a dude licks his corpse's eyeball. If Brad can't react to it, I'm not interested.

Danyael is the only 32 year old 18 year old in the world.

Oh, and Moriah 'Shining Dove' Snyder is back as Mary. She's a bit more grown up now. She still isn't a good actress, but she's only in it for 25 seconds. She has a little speech that barely has any context to anything we've been seeing, doesn't do a damn thing, and basically wastes our time. But hey, this thing is only like 80 minutes long already. I guess something had to pad it out. I'm sure she wasn't doing anything else as these movies have been pretty much the only thing she's ever been in.

And who in the blue hell ascended in this movie subtitled "The Ascent?" It wasn't Danyael, because he's still on Earth. It wasn't Pyriel because his ascent was stopped cold. Was it Gabriel?  I guess that makes sense, but that seems an odd choice because he's not even the main character, or even that important to the story. And his ascent and forgiveness is only the last 20 seconds of the movie. Seems an odd thing to subtitle your movie after. That'd be like calling it "Star Wars Episode IV: Luke Gets a Medal."

Of course the real answer is that it's a cool word that sounds ominous but means jack-diddly. I think that's a requirement for naming sequels in Hollywood. I still don't know why they couldn't just leave it at "The Prophecy 3." Or why they used the number 3 instead of Roman numerals considering the last movie did. Or why this is the last film in the series to be numbered at all. I guess it's really easy to tell which comes next chronologically - "The Prophecy: Uprising" or "The Prophecy: Forsaken." Come on, isn't it clearly obvious which one comes next? What are you, dense?

Does nobody put forth the slightest bit of effort with this stuff? And why am I constantly surprised by the fact that they don't?

Want to see something funny? Watch that chick attempt to act in the trailer. And then despair. She's in the whole movie.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Prophecy 3: The Ascent" is clearly a big step down from the sequel, which in itself was just okay. Despite some interesting imagery it never manages to become more than the same stuff we've seen before, only without the benefit of having a good cast or giving Walken fun things to do, and it's just a boring movie. Considering that the plot is nonsense anyway, I don't even know if I'd recommend watching it to finish the story, because hell if I know what just happened.

Death and Cremation (2010)

Have you noticed a trend lately? Yeah, I've been on a bit of a horror film kick. Not the stabby-slashy-torture kind of horror movie, since that's not my particular bag. I generally prefer the kind of horror movie that's a bit more psychological than gratuitous. Generally. I am not above seeing the occasional victim popping like a overripe tomato in a can opener...just not all the time.

I saw "Death and Cremation" on the new release wall, and was ready to pass it by when I noticed that it starred Brad Dourif, and that is always enough to get me interested. Aside from being one of those guys who nobody else recognizes by name, which makes me feel superior whenever the person I'm talking to says "who?", Brad Dourif is an amazing actor whom I am always incredibly entertained by. And it's not like he hasn't been in big stuff. Dude was only the voice of Chucky in the "Child's Play" series, Doc Cochran in the acclaimed HBO series "Deadwood" and Grima Wormtongue in "Lord of The Rings," among other trite offerings. No big deal, right?

What I like about Brad is that he is without a doubt, among the creepiest, scariest, most intimidating actors I can think of. When I imagine a textbook "scary" character, it's generally one of three people: Christopher Walken, Ian McShane, or Brad Dourif. But Chris and Ian are more funny or badass, respectively. What's awesome about Brad is that he seems to do it without really even having to try. I mean, I'm sure the dude's a nice guy, but it's almost like they just found some crazy person on a street corner trying to eat a pigeon and stuck him in front of a camera. He's naturalistic as hell. And I can see him eating a pigeon.

Just look at him. That's a pigeon eater, my friends.

"Death and Cremation" was not much of a slasher film, although it does center around a serial killer. And it also wasn't much of a "horror" movie in the terms that genre usually implies. By that I mean that there were no scares at all. And I'm not saying that there were no scares because they fell flat, I'm saying there really were no scares at all. You won't jump at anything in this movie, because there are literally no jumps. In that way, if you are going in expecting or hoping that it will trying to frighten you with loud bangs or have blood and guts by the truckload, you shall probably walk away from "Death and Cremation" thinking it was boring and maybe even pretentious at times.

What you need to do is go into it like you're watching a drama or something. "Death and Cremation" is a horror film the same way "Donnie Darko" is. It may have creepy imagery in it and a dark tone, but you would never call it scary. Or perhaps a better comparison would be "American Psycho," not in terms of plot or subject matter, but in terms of how it treats the "scary" stuff.

The thing about movies like "American Psycho" and "Death and Cremation" is that the deaths, while a huge part of the movie, really weren't the point of it. It was the lead in to the deaths. In horror movies like "Friday the 13th," the deaths were the only reason the movie was there. It existed to kill teenagers. The payoff was the gore, and the lead in was just to get you on edge for the gore. And you know what? "Friday the 13th" did that quite well, as one would expect from a movie that helped create an entire genre. That's how it rolls.

With "Death and Cremation," yeah, the murders are a huge factor, and the lead in is at the end to get you on edge for the gore, but since the film follows the murderers instead of the victims, we get a different perspective and flavor to the film. Since we are in their heads, the film becomes more of a question as to why they are doing the things they do instead of just waiting for them to do it again.

Since we are in their viewpoint, we start sympathizing with the killers instinctively. Someone who would normally be an antagonist is now a protagonist. Whether or not we are aware of it, looking at a villain from the viewpoint usually reserved for a more heroic figure can be quite unnerving. That's why I find horror movies like this and "American Psycho" to be more interesting to watch than straight up slasher flicks.

Am I making any sense whatsoever?

That being said, my thoughts on "Death and Cremation" were somewhat mixed. First, the things I liked about it. I thought Brad Dourif was as always amazing. He gives this performance that just screams that this character has about a thousand things that he wants to scream at the top of his lungs at any moment, but he keeps them locked up. The intensity boiling underneath him is almost agonizing to watch, because you have no idea what he wants to do or is capable of doing to someone at any given moment. He reminds me a bit of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" in that regard. Talk about a string ready to snap any time. 

The other actors also do fine jobs, including Jeremy Sumpter of the "Friday Night Lights" series and the outstanding Bill Paxton feature "Frailty." Jeremy does a good job of playing a punk kid who is bullied one time too many, but it's pretty obvious he has some issues that needed working out beforehand. I'm not defending the kids who picked on him and beat the crap out of him constantly, but from Jeremy's performance, this kid was probably not too stable to begin with.

 Pro-tip: Don't beat up the kid who seems most likely to snap and cave your head in with a bowling ball.

The other big notable thing about "Death and Cremation"  was the one absolutely brutal scene when Brad kills one of his victims. There were two death scenes involving women that were very messed up, but one involving an alley just took the cake. Now, it's not that it's overly graphic, because it's not. In terms of gore, it's maybe a 4 out of 10. But in the way it's shot, the way it's executed, and the thought...the horrifying thought of what just happened to that girl's head and face...it's nauseating. It sickened me more than I think I've been affected by a movie in recent memory. The only other scenes in movies that I can remember disturbing me on such a base level was the "Lust" sin in "Se7en," the "Singin' In The Rain" bit from "A Clockwork Orange," and the scene were the shark eats Quint in "Jaws."


With scenes like that, I couldn't help continuing to think about them. And it was the thought that made it worse. I just sat back, hand to my mouth saying "Dude...dude, what the f-...oh man. That's messed up. Dude..." That's all I could bring myself to say. The other deaths were honestly pretty weak, especially compared to that. And trust me, you'll know it when you get there.

You may have read that and thought that is a reason you would never watch this film. I would actually say that scene is a point in its favor. That means the movie is doing its job.

This brings us to the problems with "Death and Cremation." Among the few gripes I had was the fact that honestly, you never really got to know Brad Dourif's character enough to get a handle on why he was doing what he was doing. Really, the only explanation given is that he had a messed up childhood and his dad beat him. I mean, that's all well and good, but is that really all you can give me for the reason that he goes out and kills anyone he deems a bully? Life tends to be more complicated than that. All we get is one little fragmented dream sequence flashback that lasts maybe 30 seconds, and that's the entire backstory for this character? Lame.

The second problem I had is that the scenes when the bullies are beating up Jeremy Sumpter range from effective to laughably staged. An extended one-take shot scene of Jeremy getting the snot kicked out of him in the bathroom is mostly made up of the bullies just faffing about and not really doing anything substantial or even very threatening to him (oh no! pouring beer on me!), yet he's squirming on the floor like they're spraying pepper spray up his nose. And then they give him a rather convincing looking punch in the face that I'm not even 100% sure wasn't real, and all I could think was "See? THAT looked good. What's up with the rest of this crap?"

And the ending? Well, that's kind of up in the air. I won't spoil it for you on the off chance you want to see it, but suffice to say it has its problems. Yet at the same time, it works when you think about it. It's not like murder is easy, you know.

 It most certainly is, my friend!

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Death and Cremation" is worth a look if you like Brad Dourif. Absolutely. If you don't know who that is, shame on you, but this could be a decent introduction. Definitely for a niche audience who like their horror a bit more on the thematic side rather than splatter-packed, but the later could enjoy it for a horror-tinged drama. And hey! It has a Baldwin in it! (It's the one who did a lot of drugs) Recommended.