Weirdhouse Cinema: The Prophecy (1995)

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss 1995’s “The Prophecy,” in which rebel angels vie for the soul of a war criminal in the Arizona desert. Written and directed by “Highlander” creator Gregory Widen, the movie stars Christopher Walken, Elias Koteas, Virginia Madsen, Eric Stolz and Viggo Mortensen.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And Hey,
if you are new to our podcast, we thought maybe
we should give a brief explainer of what Weird House
Cinema is because it's a little bit different than the
pitch of our regular episodes. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays
in the Stuff to Blow your Mind feed, we run
our core science and culture episodes. Taste for topics there

(00:37):
is quite broad, but they tend to have a more
kind of interest, curiosity, academic kind of focus, that sort
of thing. And then on Fridays we do a very
different type of show. That's what you're here for today.
It is Weird House Cinema, where we just talk about
weird movies, not a whole lot of specific criteria except
that it's got to be weird. So we do films

(00:58):
that are good and bad, old and new, or relatively
new and well known or obscure. We do them all,
except they've got to have something weird about them. Usually
they're from the speculative genres, and especially if there is
something esthetically or thematically strange. We that's our territory.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah. Yeah. Generally our approach is though we we try
to find something to love in any of the films
we discuss in Weird House Cinema. I'd say that's something
that maybe sets us a little apart from other shows.
I'll also say that, you know, sometimes we will get
into a more serious topic in the Weird House Cinema episode,
but it is not a guarantee. You know, sometimes there'll

(01:38):
be a science angle that pops up, or some sort
of interesting cultural aspect of the piece, but it is
it is not always the case. Sometimes it's it's straight goofiness.
It just depends. And often there's a fair amount of nostalgia.
And that's that's very much in play on today's episode
because we're gonna be talking about a film that I
was absolutely thrilled for or when it first came out

(02:01):
back in nineteen ninety five. It is The Prophecy, not
to be confused with the Killer Bear film that came
out before this. This is the angelic supernatural thriller. I
guess you'd call it The Prophecy starring Christopher Walkin, so
Joe I was seventeen when this film came out, and
in so many ways, absolutely perfect film for a teenage

(02:26):
Bible raised and sort of MTV nourished kid like myself.
Here was a weird fantasy horror film with mid nineties
attitude about angels, particularly rebel angels, from the guy who
wrote Highlander, and starring none other than Christopher Walkin.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, yeah, So I had never seen The Prophecy until
a few days ago, so this was brand new for me.
A couple of the early scenes looked a little bit familiar,
so maybe I caught a scene or two on TV
back in the day, but I'd never seen the film.
This would have been right in my wheelhouse when I
was in like ninth grade. This would have been like
the coolest thing ever to me at that age. And also,

(03:09):
I think I was telling you about this when we
were chatting a couple weeks ago. I have a vague
memory of not seeing this movie but becoming aware of
it when I was in high school and feeling a
very particular kind of disappointment when I became aware of it,

(03:29):
the disappointment of having realized a cool idea I had
for a story I wanted wanted to write, had already
been written. And so it was like ninth grade and
in my English class, we I think had read Frankenstein,
and then from there had gotten into talking about Paradise Lost,
because that's you know, the themes of Paradise It's referenced

(03:49):
in Frankenstein, and then you know, the themes are explored
through the comparison between Satan and the creature in Frankenstein.
And so anyway, I got interested in the idea of
Paradise Lost. And in the opening scene, the pandemonium scene,
you know, the debate in hell uh, and I had
this idea like, whoa, what if I were to write
a story that was set in the modern day about

(04:12):
a war between angels? And I was like trying to
dream up all this stuff. And then without seeing this film,
I somehow became aware that of this movie and that
that was already the premise of this movie. And I
was kind of like somebody already got.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
There, Well, a number of people got there. Yeah, And
I do hate that this this movie scared off Young
Joe from writing that that that that epic saga.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
I think mine would have been quite different in realization.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
But oh yeah, that's a great thing about Angel media.
There's there's room for so much variation here. And one
of the interesting things about this film is that supposedly
the financial success of this sort of like mid budget
picture kind of paved the way for a lot of
other Angel related media, especially you your darker angel media,

(05:00):
not to be confused with some of the lighter hearted
fare out there. Not to say that this was the
first film to feature, you know, sort of like trench
coat wearing angels and so forth.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
I assume this comes after the Wings of Desire. I
didn't check, but does this come before or after the
City of Angels adaptation? Okay, we just went off Mike
for a second and checked. Yeah, so Wings of Desire
was eighty seven. But the Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan
is it Meg Ryan?

Speaker 2 (05:30):
I think so.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
In that adaptation of Wings of Desire, which does have
angels and trench coats, came after the Prophecy. Very different tone,
different subject matter. It's kind of hard to imagine that
the Prophecy inspired the Nicholas Cage version, especially since that
was an adaptation of a pre existing film. But I

(05:52):
don't know, maybe maybe a little bit in there.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, I did not certainly I don't
think I knew about Wings of Desire yet time when
this came out. So I was I was interested in
metal and fantasy, dungeons and dragons, and you know, to
my limited ability in the occult, you know, whatever I
could find at the nearest books a million or Barnes

(06:15):
and Noble or whatever. We had. The wall of my
room was a collage of like Gustav dore woodcuts and
fantasy illustrations, and I had a big old poster of
Glenn Danzig with Icars wings. You know. So I was
playing a lot of magic the gathering, I was listening
to a lot of like nine Inch Nails and Black Sabbath.
But I think one of the interesting things is looking back,

(06:37):
you know, there was a dominant surrounding Christian culture, and
I think it made complete straightforward fascination with demons somewhat intimidating,
like not impossible, and clearly lots of you know, kids
did have that interest. But for me at least, it
felt like, Okay, here's a way to balance all of
that out in a way that will I don't know,

(06:58):
keep me in in good things with other people or something,
but it felt right to balance out this interest in
like demons with an interest in angels, you know, and
it's something you can do when you're stuck in church,
Like you got a Bible there, you can just start
turning to all the weirder parts and looking for the
parts that have weird angels.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Though I think sometimes people are disappointed to learn that
a lot of the really weird, really cool angel lore
is not actually in any of the canonical scripture, is it.
You know, there is there are like ancient texts talking
about this, but they tend to be various, apocryphal, or
not canonical within mainstream Christian denominations.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah. Yeah, there's still some weird stuff in the in
the Bible. Yeah, and you can look it up and
certainly relish it. But yeah, I was even reading stuff.
I think I read Screwtape for the first time, you know,
which deals more with demons. Obviously, I read Billy Graham's
Angels at the time, like that was that was very
much a you know, a supported read. But you know,

(08:02):
at the end of the day, angels are just devils
that haven't fallen yet. And you know, even within the
soul context of Biblical and Christian traditions, there're plenty strange.
There are plenty weird and more than a little terrifying.
So this movie was pretty exciting to me, and when
I finally got to see it, probably on VHS, it
did not disappoint. I specifically remember being taken by the

(08:24):
way the angels in this movie frequently perch like birds,
often in ways that defy gravity. Yeah, and I remember
like thinking this looks super cool, especially when Christopher Walkin
did it. I remember thinking it looks like suitably weird,
dark and outsidery. And so I would try doing it myself,

(08:46):
not in ways that were impossible or physically dangerous, but
you know, I would would. I would try out the
angelic perch position whilst say, waiting outside of the local
card shop for other people to show up so we
could play magic and stuff. Wow, And little did I know,
I was actually practicing, kind of practicing a yoga pose
that I would do a lot more much later on

(09:09):
in my life. In fact, I like to think I'm
rather good at this particular pose, and I wonder if
it has anything to do with this movie if I
got in some extra practice on it early on. Probably not.
I actually reached out to my yoga teacher Alison shout
out to Condra Yoga to ask her what pose Walkin
in particular is busting out in this film. I sent
her some screen grabs from the movie and she thinks

(09:31):
it's probably an adaptation of either Garland pose or toe
balance pose. So not one hundred percent he's doing some
different things with his arms, but essentially angelic graveyard yoga
in this movie.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
Well, I don't want to take away at all from
the coolness of what you saw on it, because I
see what you mean. But I do have to admit
when I first saw it in the movie, I could
not contain my laughter in the scene with Eric Stoltz
doing it, because he's on the back of the chair
in the detective's apartment, squatting up like a vulture there
reading a book and the coat is dangling off the

(10:06):
back of him. It's that part I thought was quite funny.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Well, now as we first see it with with Eric
Stultz's character, yeah, it's sort of it's a little surreal,
maybe a little laughter inducing, But I mean, when Christopher
Walkin's doing it, you have to admit it's cool. Every
time does Christopher Walkin do anything in this movie that's
not just maddeningly cool. Well, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
Christopher Walkin is a different kind of thing because this
movie has a mix of tones. Some of the characters
in this movie appear to be going for a straight
hard nineties occult cool, you know, very like sunglasses, long coat,
like this is so sick. And then other characters in
the movie are bring a kind of lightness and a humor.

(10:49):
And Christopher Walkin absolutely does all of his scenes. He
is being incredibly playful even while he's you know, delivering
these dark mondsgues about how he raises cities to the
ground and so he's always on screen, got a twinkle
in his eye and kind of a dancer's energy. He's

(11:10):
just giving a funny, lively, prancing kind of performance, and
it's it's definitely there in the way he does the
pose as well.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
Yeah, I was watching some of the extras on this one,
and we'll get to that addition here in just a minute.
But one of the things about the pose the perch
that the actors are using here is they were all
capable of assuming this pose, but it's not really a
pose you can hold for extended period of time, for

(11:41):
like multiple takes and so forth, and also in sometimes
sometimes dangerous positions they're putting them, or physically impossible positions.
So they would have to have them adopt the perch,
and then they would measure them and create a harness
to hold them in place for the shots. But they
had to like figure out what poe exactly what form
of the post they were taking first, and the extras.

(12:04):
The filmmakers were talking about how they came to walk
In with this, and he's like, I'm gonna have to
think about this and then Walkin. This is like, you know,
shortly before filming, and then Walkin calls them back in
the middle of the night and he says, I'm perching
like he had found the perch beautiful.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
Well, I have to imagine this would be difficult to
hold even with a harness supporting your weight, because like
your legs are bunched up under you, Like would the
harness hold your legs as well?

Speaker 2 (12:32):
I didn't. I think I saw some sketches of the harness,
but it didn't really get a good idea of exactly
how it's holding them in position, I mean comfortably enough
that Walkin does it on the edge of a top
of a building at one point and then apparently didn't
feel too much in peril. But yeah, it must have
been comfortable enough for them to do multiple takes, because

(12:54):
we see this from multiple actors at different points in
the film. So we'll come back more on the perch
later on. Though. To be clear, even my teenage self,
I wanted to be Christopher Walkin, not so much the
other Angels. But yeah, coming back to this movie more
than thirty years after I originally saw it, I have
to say that on the whole, I think it holds

(13:15):
up pretty well. There's to be clear, there's some dumb
stuff in here, but we have some wonderful actors. It
manages to deliver largely deliver on this weird rebel angel
tale set in the Arizona Desert with cool effects, cool
practical effects for the most part. And it was lighter
on the nineties cringe than I was fearful of. You know,

(13:38):
coming back to a movie from the mid nineties, it's
easy to wonder exactly how much of it is going
to still be still be good. But I felt like
it held up pretty well all right. My elevator pitch
for this one, Joe is just simply rebel angels need
American war criminals. That.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
Yeah, that is a correct description of the plot, and
one of the more puzzling things about it like that
angels are not capable of like that humans do war
better than angels do, and so they need our worst,
the worst war commanders ever do like to recruit, I guess,
or I mean it's used as a kind of substance, yeah, or.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Or I don't know. I thought maybe they're going to, like,
you know, body him up and use him as a general.
I'm not sure, but I guess it does kind of
fit with one of the things, the idea that the rebeling,
the new rebel Angels, as we'll discuss Gabriel and his
crew here, they do not like human beings. They think
they are on the whole bad. They're they're jealous that

(14:44):
they became God's favorite, and maybe this is part of it.
It's like humans are capable of evil in a way
that angels and devils are kind of like, wow, that's impressive.
We didn't know you could do it like that, And
therefore they become a valuable asset to to this angelic
war that's ongoing.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
One thing I really do like about this movie, and
think works quite well about it is the way it
represents angels as very different than the way I understood
angels like as a child in church, where I understood
them as a as almost without personalities of their own

(15:24):
and without a will of their own or an ability
to you know, deviate. There are sort of pure expressions
of God's will and goodness. Yeah, yeah, they're like robots
that enact the will of God. And this movie doesn't
present them that way. In this movie, they are much
more like a pantheon of pagan gods. You know, they

(15:46):
they have their own motivations. They can you know, they
can be good or bad or shades in between. They
can do bad in service of what they think is
doing good. They can and they to cross purposes to
each other. So I think it's just more like you
get in, you know, with gods in these pagan contexts,

(16:07):
or maybe in certain visions of angels in the in
the history of Christianity and Judaism. What you would have
to assume, for example, to really think about the implications
of a war in heaven or a rebellion of Lucifer
or things like that. You know, there's got to be
sort of a will acting against the divine command.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Yeah, as a number of the visions one might get
for a war in heaven, though involved I think angelic
hosts with like swords of light and so forth, not
so much in this film. This is more angels as
savage harpies trying to claw each other's hearts out of
their chests and casting each other down onto stakes where

(16:48):
they're impaled, like you know, a forest of screaming angels,
that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (16:52):
You've got Gabriel, and you've got Metatron, and you've got
Jason Vorhees, the Angel. There are quite a few moments
in this movie that where the angels behave like slasher
movie slashers.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, yeah, definitely strong horror vibes here. All right. Now,
at this point you might be wondering, well, I would like,
where can I go on out and watch The Prophecy. Well,
there's a strong argument to be made for just watching
this bad way and VHS as the Lord of Hosts intended.
But failing that, it is widely available digitally, and we
both watched it on the excellent Vinegar Syndrome. The Prophecy

(17:26):
one through three collection, great quality, great extras, and yes,
as we'll come back to. This movie was enough of
a hit to spawn multiple non theatrical releases. Only the
first three collected in this set have Christopher walkin, though,
and you know, I think the Prophecy demands Christopher walkin
like he is the savage, angelic heart of this picture,

(17:48):
and any sequels that were.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
Made ironically the soul of the film.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Oh, and we should say, just in case you're new
to the show, that our discussion of movies are always
laden with lots of spoilers. So we discussed the plot
in a lot of detail in the second half of
the episode, and we will freely talk about things that
happen later in the film. So yeah, if you would
like to go into the Prophecy fresh, unspoiled, not knowing
anything in advance, she should probably hop out. Now, you know,

(18:18):
pause this, go watch the movie and then come back.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
That's right, All right, Let's talk about some of the
folks behind this movie, starting with the director and writer
Gregory Widen born nineteen fifty eight American writer, producer, and
director who famously famously wrote a little script in his

(18:42):
UCLA screenwriting class about Immortal Swordsman, which he managed to
sell for two hundred thousand dollars, and this became the
nineteen eighty six cult favorite Highlander, directed by Russell McKay,
and he'd retain a character's credit on all future Highlander projects,
but it was only involved in the screenplay I believe
of the first film.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
So in both cases wrote something that had a bunch
of sequels and spin offs.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I believe with the same as
with the Prophecy, I don't think he was really involved
in the writing and certainly not the directing on the
subsequent Prophecy flicks. But he followed up Highlander with teleplay
work on a nineteen eighty eight TV movie titled Weekend War,
and then also the nineteen ninety one firefighting movie Backdraft,

(19:31):
directed by Ron Howard and starring Kurt Russell, among others.
And he also both wrote and directed the nineteen ninety
three Tales from the Crypt episode Halfway Horrible, starring Clancy Brown,
Martin Cove, and Cheech Marin. But it was after this
that he wrote a script I believe had like the
working title God's Army about revel angels, and he set
out to direct it himself, securing an indie film budget,

(19:53):
and most importantly the casting of Christopher Walken, which made
everything possible.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
I would love this is one of those cases where,
you know, you read the stories about other actors who
were considered for the role of Han solo or something.
I would love to know who else would have been
considered for the role of Gabriel.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
It's hard. I believe it was written with Walkin in
mind and they were able to get him. So yeah,
it's it's hard to imagine anyone else really playing it
in a way that would be as fun and memorable
as this. Like you could, you know, easily go more
dark and brooding, but I don't know, you need that
particular Walkin energy to make it work. In my opinion.

(20:33):
On the Vinegar Syndrome extras, Widened points points out that
there are various challenges in getting to the point of
actually making this film, including producers saying, well, we love it,
but what if we just made the angels demons instead,
and they were like, well that then it's just like
every other film that's already out there. Like the fact
that their angels is what's making this different. Yeah, and

(20:56):
so the prophecy you know, comes together light on budget,
but high on ambition and seemingly largely true to the
director and writer's vision here. I think there's there's a
what a CGI effect pretty late in the film that
I'm to understand was a Mirramax suggestion, And I think
there's a strong argument to be made that, you know

(21:17):
that it's one of the parts of the film that
hasn't held up all that well.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
But oh, is this when the child coughs up a
skeleton made of fire?

Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah, and it then like holy light reveals the soul's
hideous form and then it gets sucked away. Yeah. Yeah,
not the best moment of the film. But on the whole,
the Prophecy proved a success. It spawned two walkin Hilm sequels,
and then two more that he was not attached to.
Widen didn't direct again to date, but went on to

(21:47):
write twenty nineteen's Backdraft two and twenty seventeen's Other Life.
He is still active now. The subsequent Prophecy films real quick,
I'm just going to run through them so you know
what they are. Prophecy two in ninety eight. That one
had Russell Wong, Jennifer Bials, Brittany Murphy, Eric Roberts, a
cameo by Glenn Danzig and then Christopher Walken of course

(22:09):
in the lead.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
Was Danzig playing an angel?

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, yes, he plays a fallen angel that gets his
heart ripped out early in the picture. So in a
small role, but nice get. Probably one of the better
films Glenn Danzig has appeared in, if not the best.
The Prophecy three in two thousand the Assent. This one
had Vincent Spano in it and Brad Dorif and then

(22:33):
we get the two Walking List sequels. We have the
Prophecy Uprising in two thousand and three with John Light
Doug Bradley's in that one, and then we have the
Prophecy Forsaken in two thousand and five that has Jason
Scott Lee and also Tony Todd.

Speaker 3 (22:47):
So by the fourth one, they stopped putting numbers on
them and it just became colon word right, right.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
And yeah, And I certainly haven't seen the last two,
so I can't really speak to those. And again they're
not included on the Vinegar Syndrome set that that we acquired.
All right, let's get into the cast here. I'm going
to take it in a different order. We're going to
start with the angels and demons, because you know, the
humans were the monkeys as the angels, as Gabriel calls

(23:14):
him in the film, on the whole less interesting. You know,
you don't come into the prophecy because you're like, I
want to see a movie about a priest who became
a homicide detective.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
No, I don't know that detail was really funny when
they first come He's like, no, I'm a cop. Is
there any think about the Bible a lot?

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Though? Is there anything more fittingly like mid nineties than that?
It's just so, it is so perfect.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, but yes, Christopher Walkin plays Gabriel born nineteen forty three.
Does the Prophecy deliver on the prospect of Christopher Walkin
playing a rebel angel at work in the modern world?
I would say it absolutely does. He brings all of
his trademark weirdness, his intensity, consummate professionalism, and yeah, you

(23:59):
absolutely by that. This cat is an actual ethereal being,
sniffing out cinners, sometimes licking gross surfaces as well, to
find them in condemned schools and desert trailer communities in Arizona.
If we didn't mention already, this is an on the
whole an Arizona movie. This is a desert movie.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
Yeah, well parts of it are in La at the beginning,
and then it moves to Arizona.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah right, But even that, I think there's only the
church scene is shot in an actual church in LA.
But I think when they're when we're getting like the
La detective stuff, I think they're shooting Phoenix for La. Okay,
the movie doesn't really come into its own until it's
actually in the desert though, in my opinion.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
Yeah, interesting fact that when we first meet Gabriel in
the film, First of all, he shows up later than
you would expect. If I had Christopher Walkin playing Gabriel
in my movie, I would get him in within the
first ten pages. But you got to wait like twenty
five minutes for him to show up in this movie.
But it is interesting that when we first meet him,
he is playing an angel detective to mirror our main

(25:05):
human character's human detective role. So he like arrives at
the same crime scene, but uses a different set of
tools to investigate, mainly his nose and his tongue.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah. I mean, because he's an angel, all his senses
are just you know, ramped up to twenty. He's not limited,
so he can smell things and taste things, and yeah,
he can look at things as well, and in ways
that humans can't.

Speaker 3 (25:27):
When we did our core episodes about licking a few
weeks ago, did you bring this up? I feel like
you did.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
I brought in one of the I think it's the
third one. The angels can lick human eyeballs to taste
their memories. But we did briefly mention the Prophecy franchise. Okay,
So Walkin, of course, is always a treat. One of
those great weird actors that just fills up the screen,
often in very subtle ways. You know, he can be

(25:54):
very minimalist in his approach, and of course can also
go broad. You know, he has a very rhythmic style.
He's great at movement. You see that dance background in
so much of what he does. I was reading about
his influence, and I believe it was Benicio del Toro
who stated that Walkin once him gave him a great

(26:15):
piece of advice and said, when you're in a scene
and you don't know what you're going to do, don't
do anything, which which is also sounds humorous, but it
sounds like there's a real nugget of truth there. And
again you can see that in sort of the minimalist
approach that he takes to things that he can be
very entertaining and intense without you know, shaking and doing anything,

(26:39):
notably on the screen.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
That is great advice, though, I just thinking about it now,
I think that applies probably to some actors more than others,
because there's a certain type of charisma that causes people
to be in suspense when you are not in motion
or not doing anything. There's another way you can be
where when you're not doing anything, people just register you

(27:03):
as static and tune you out. Walkin is not in
that camp. When he's not doing anything, you're looking at
him going, what's he about to do? What's he going
to do?

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Yeah? Yeah, And so yeah, he's so entertaining when he's
on the screen. And again, coming back to the fact
that he shows up so late in this film, relatively
twenty five minutes, then yeah, it's like it's not to
say that the film is boring until he shows up.
There's a lot of interesting things happening on the screen.
But yeah, everything really takes on new energy when he's
actually part of the film.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
So Walkin was the son of Scottish and German immigrants
in Queens and he has, I believe in interviews attributed
some aspects of his signature delivery, sort of the Walkin
accent that is so often reproduced by comedians and so forth.
But he's attributed to the plethora of accents he grew
up around. His mother encouraged him and his brothers Ken

(27:55):
and Glenn to act as children, and they both continued
his other his siblings continued to act as well. I
think Ken with several credits in the fifties and sixties,
Glenn threw around ninety one, and Chris also acted as
a child in extra parts with credits going back to
nineteen fifty three. He was Ronnie Walkin at the time.
His birth name is Ronald, but then he ends up

(28:17):
changing that professionally to Christopher or Chris later on. So,
as we've alluded to, he professionally trained in dance. He
found work on stage and TV early on. He made
his feature film debut in sixty nine's Me and My Brother,
followed by seventy one's The Anderson Tapes with Sean Connery
and The Mind Snatchers in seventy one with Joss Acklund.

(28:41):
This was followed by The Sentinel and Annie Hall in
seventy seven, and of course, The Deer Hunter in seventy eight,
for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Subsequent films of note leading into today's pick include nineteen
eighties Heaven's Gate, eighty one's Pennies from Heaven, eighty three's
The Dead Zone. That's, of course, Cronenberg based on the
Stephen King novel eighty five's of You to a Kill,

(29:03):
in which he played a Bond villain.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
Yes, yeah, the guy who's doing something in Silicon Valley.
He's got a blimp.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, he's a what He's a Silicon Valley Nazi test
tube baby? Is that right? Who does also have a
limp with a trap door.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
He's like, he's got like a pure white wig. I think,
is that right?

Speaker 2 (29:26):
I remember that? Right?

Speaker 3 (29:27):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (29:28):
I don't remember what her white hair, but I do
I do vaguely remember the walkin energy in that one.
Let's see. We also had the likes of eighty nine's Communion,
nineteen nineties King of New York, ninety one's McBain, The
action film Fain, ninety two's Batman Returns, ninety three's True Romance,
and of course ninety four is pulp fiction. That's a

(29:49):
key one because we have a number of actors in
this movie coming right hot on the heels of pulp
fiction success.

Speaker 3 (29:57):
Oh, you're right. It has Walking, it has Amanda Plumber,
she's in pulp fiction. Oh, it took me a second
to think of the other. But Eric Stultz, he's in
pulp fiction. Though the characters, these three characters in pulp
fiction never interact with each other.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
Yeah, not that I remember. It's been a while since
I sat down and watched pulp fiction, but but yeah,
I don't offhand remember them having scenes together. So at
this point in his career, Walkin was very well established.
But he also had a reputation, and I think has
for the most part, maintained this reputation of never turning
down a role unless he had a scheduling commitment. You know,

(30:30):
there may have been cases where he turned something down
for other reasons, but that was kind of the reputation
he had, you know, very professional and would generally do
it and find something to love about whatever he was
working on. So he's continued to work in. His subsequent
roles include, in addition to two more Prophecy films, Let's
See ninety six is bascyat ninety nine, Sweepy Hollow, the
two thousand and seven musical Hairspray, twenty twelve Seven Psychopaths,

(30:54):
and then there's of course Dune Part two from twenty
twenty four, in which he plays the Padisha Emperor. Yeah. So, yeah,
I've never found a walk in performance whacking. Yeah, He's
always interesting to watch on screen, and his Gabriel here
is a nice mix of subdued menacing outsider, vicious, angelic
gangster and just snarling avian creep. So I love it.

(31:17):
The temperature comes up or it cools way down whenever
he's on screen.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
So one impression I had of this movie, and it's
kind of hard to say why. Maybe it's because the
angels are always sniffing the air, but it feels to
me like a pungent films. You can kind of smell it,
and it doesn't necessarily smell good. It's sharp, strong, going
into the scent receptors in there. And this really matches

(31:41):
up with a trivia story you were telling me about
walking on set.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, so there's this whole thing, so there are a
couple of different angles on it. There have been various
actors in this film that have mentioned that the Christopher
Walkin would chew a whole raw clothes of garlic before
his scenes, to the extent that you would like smell
the garlic before he entered the room, sort of a situation,

(32:07):
and then there would be a strong aura of garlic
on him during the scenes. And some of these actors
speculated that he was doing it in order to provoke
a kind of visceral, repulsive response on behalf of his
fellow actors to the presence of Gabriel. That's one possibility.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
I had another thought about this, which is that while
watching the movie, I noticed in several ways the angels
are kind of inverse vampires. They are like holy vampires.
I was thinking about this in several ways. One is
that in order to kill them, you have to attack
the heart. It's like the stake through the heart of

(32:50):
the vampire. You have to pull out the heart of
the angel in order to finally slay them. In their
earthly form, they have some vampiric or certainly in the
nineties movie Lexicon vampiric imagery about them. You know, this
was a time where we were seeing a lot of
movies with vampires in trench codes, walking around sunglasses and stuff,

(33:15):
So there's that angle too. But also, especially with Gabriel,
he often has makeup that makes him look like a
movie vampire.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yeah, very pale and then the dark hair.

Speaker 3 (33:26):
And he creates vampires familiars. Did you think about this
with the character Jerry and then Amanda Plummer's character he
is he a big part of his character is that
he has to go out recruiting renfields. But anyway, I
guess I got kind of sidetracked there. So if these
are being imagined as holy vampires, they're like the vampires

(33:46):
of Heaven, would that mean that instead of being defeated
by garlic, they must consume garlic, so they're literally just
chewing raw garlic all the time.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
It's like a holy power.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
It fits. Yeah, yeah, I don't. Kind of like with
the regular vampire, you have to know all the heart
in with these, with these vampires of Heaven, you have
to take the heart out, you know, It's like you're
going the opposite.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
I like it. I like it to the point that
if they were to ever remake and relaunch this franchise,
and I don't think they should. And because you could
never get anybody to really play it would be hard
to find somebody that really had the Walkan kind of
energy here. But that would be a great thing to add,
is that all the all the angels in the film
have to eat garlic all the time, raw garlic all

(34:29):
the time.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
Yeah. So so one idea, they're always touching silver. They
get two reflections in a mirror.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
I like it. It writes itself. Yeah, but so so
one idea is that that Walkin was eating garlic all
the time for the project. But the other, and I
think Wyden himself says that this is the case in
one of the extras on the Vinegar Syndrome, just is
that this is just something Christopher Walken does or did,
just chewing raw garlic, and it's just he likes garlic,

(35:00):
Like he's actually had published recipes for, I think, like
some sort of garlic seafood dish, Like he loves cooking
with garlic, and he likes eating raw garlic. And you
know that's not personally my thing, eating the raw garlic,
cook with it all the time. But garlic is super
healthy for you, so there may be various health benefits
to just chewing it raw all the time.

Speaker 3 (35:22):
I've never gone that route, but I am a garlic fiend,
you know. I think a lot of people do this,
but I any recipe that tells me a quantity of garlic,
I'm gonna at least double it all.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have often found like I have
never made something with too much garlic. It's generally as
much garlic as I can bring myself to peel and
chop at a given point, and so it depends on
the size of the garlic. But then I've also felt
like if you get the really big garlic, like the
elephant garlic, it doesn't have the same flavor. At least
the time I tried the elephant garlic, I was like,

(35:54):
that's so big, it'll be so easy to peel, right,
And then I get it and it's like it's not
as flavorful.

Speaker 3 (35:59):
Yeah, get that stuff. You just you gotta do the work.
You just gotta feel it. That's the price of garlic.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah, all right. So we'll have much more to say
about Walkins Gabriel as we continue, but more angels here
as we mentioned. Eric Stoltz born nineteen sixty one plays
the angel Simon. Even when I saw it as a teenager,
I was like, there are so many cool angel names,
either biblical or from like the various occult lore out there.

(36:25):
Why go with Simon? Why not go with something like
Mathathiel or whatever? You know, there's so many cool angel names.
Why Simon?

Speaker 3 (36:33):
Multiple characters in this movie have names that are again
not trying to hate on it, but in a very
on the nose way establish the themes of the character,
Like our main doubting priest, his name is Thomas, doubting Thomas.
So I was wondering if something like that is going
on with Simon. Is he supposed to be? I don't know.

(36:54):
Is a theme about his character that he echoes a
major Simon in the Bible?

Speaker 2 (36:59):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (36:59):
I couldn't really find anything like that, So it just
seems like he's called Simon.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
Well, at any rate, he is an angel and essentially
our good angel, or he's our loyal angel. He's like
still on God's team, is he?

Speaker 3 (37:13):
I have questions about the mechanics of the Angel war
because the only characters in the movie where I was
fully sure that they were in the war in Heaven
and which side they were on are Gabriel and then
his henchman Guy Uziel, who we see earlier. So they're
on one side in the war in Heaven. Simon is

(37:34):
acting against their purposes, but he actually on the other side.
He talks like he's not part of the war, like
he's he says like, I'm tired of this war. He
talks about it like he doesn't want to be involved
with the war and he's trying to make it stop
or something.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
Yeah, he does feel more neutral. That's a good point.

Speaker 3 (37:54):
But maybe I don't know. Maybe that's just how you know.
I guess a lot of times within a conflict, people
see them so elves as you know, even if you're
on one side, you're like, well, my side is the
default and the correct side, so I'm not really a partisan.
I'm neutral.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Yeah, yeah, all right, Well again. Eric Stult's coming in
hot off of Pulp Fiction, in which he played Lance,
the drug Dealer. His TV credits go back to seventy
eight and his first film role was eighty two's Fast
Times at Ridgemont High. He was nominated for a Golden
Clove for his role in eighty five's The Mask and
other big films include Let's See eighty nine's The Fly
To where he plays son of Brundle Say Anything. From

(38:31):
the same year ninety six is Jerry Maguire ninety seven's Anaconda.
Ooh yeah, did he get eaten by snake in that?

Speaker 3 (38:38):
No he doesn't, He's not in a lot of the movie.
He's there setting him up at the beginning like he's
gonna be one of the main characters of the film.
But then in sort of the end of act one,
he gets an injury that places him in bed for
the rest of the movie.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
Oh man, Yeah, okay, no snake action for him, all right.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
He does not get eaten, Yeah, he gets he gets
sabotaged by John Voyce. I think one day we're gonna
have to do anaconda because it's one of my favorite
creature features. It's just a it's a hoot.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Yeah, we'll have to come back to that one. So
in general, Eric Stultz here, you know, I like him.
I think he has a good ethereal weird energy, you know,
comes off more neutral good. But also, like all the
angels in this film, like every all the angels are
played is sort of weird, potentially dangerous hobos.

Speaker 3 (39:25):
Vaguely threatening, even though not as threatening as Christopher Walken.
He they give him an His sort of outfit and
grooming in this movie is kind of grunge band, Like, yeah,
it looks like he could be a member of Pearl Jam.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
I think so. Yeah, yeah, So it's kind of like
in just considering Simon versus Gabriel, it's kind of grunge
versus what post punk industrial or something, I don't know,
a little bit of goth.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
Yeah, yeah, Gabriel is more goth and and Simon is grunge.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
A couple of more angels here, though this first one
I guess technically devil at this point, but former angel
laid in the picture Lucifer is going to make his
presence known, and he is played by Vigo Mordensen born
nineteen fifty eight. Yes, the man who had become Aragorn
in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies, and
then go on to star in such pictures as a

(40:28):
number of Cronenberg films, A History of Violence in two
thousand and five, Eastern Promises in two thousand and seven,
for which he was nominated for an Oscar Dangerous Method
in twenty eleven and two thousand and two's Crimes of
the Future.

Speaker 3 (40:41):
I think Eastern Promises. Isn't that the one where he
has the naked fight scene against the guys with the
putty knives?

Speaker 2 (40:48):
Yeah? Yeah, brutal, brutal action sequence there, let's see also
two thousand and nine's The Road, Speaking of brutal twenty
Sixteens Captain fantastic Oscar nomination there in twenty eighteen book
also an Oscar nominated performance. Prior to all of that,
though his film credits they go back to eighty four,
with a made for TV George Washington movie. He did

(41:10):
not play George Washington was supporting role, but he also
had a supporting role in eighty five's Witness and then
some horror movie roles that included eighty seven's Prison and
of course nineteen nineties leather Face. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre three,
he plays a handsome Texan named Text who turns out
to uh oh, be part of the cannibal saw Your Plan.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
Never seen the Texas Chainsaw movies past two. You kind
of can't do better than two, So I almost don't
want to see more.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
Yeah, I mean, it's been a long time since I
saw three. Three as I recall, was like a weird
mix of sequel and remake of the first one, and
I remember thinking, oh, man, he's really going for it,
playing this handsome cannibal, but in a way where he's
almost too good in it, where he kind of steals

(42:00):
the show and outshines everything else that's going on there.
Similar thing actually happens in the next one with Matthew
McConaughey playing like a crazy, handsome textan cannibal in a way.
I think he's one of the cannibals in that or
he's part of the Illuminati. I don't know. That One's
a very confusing picture, but they do so anyway. All

(42:26):
I'm saying is that before he became famous for, uh,
these other roles, Mortensen definitely had some strong, nasty villain
energy that he got to inject into some of his performances.
And that's what we get here. We get weird energy
villain Vigo playing a Miltonian satan by way of ninety sensibilities,

(42:47):
snarling and also scatological energy, talks a fair amount about
poop in his sequences, and he famously requested to pull
a rose out of his butt. During the introductions sequence
for his character, He's like, I'll do it, but I
need to pull a rose out of my butt, and
he has a rose. It doesn't play like that in

(43:09):
the finished film, but I think it speaks volumes to
what he was trying to do here.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
Full of ideas, strong late film appearance there are This
movie does keep adding characters later in the you know,
there's only twenty minutes left and they're adding new characters.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
Yeah, what if we introduced Satan as a pivotal character,
not just when you first see him you think, oh,
it's just a full cameo, But no, he becomes an
important character. And apparently Morningsen was a last minute replacement
for Malcolm McDowell, whoa the Star Trek movie where he
kills Captain Kirk.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
Wait, he couldn't do this because he was doing that right, right,
that was a Star Trek Generations or something.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean Malcolm McDowell certainly could have
played Satan in this, but I don't know. I end
up like having the the the younger energy that we
get with Vigo here.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
He does some good heart eating at the end.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yeah, all right, And then we mentioned the Angel you seel.
He is played by Jeff Cadente, stuntman and actor who
also worked on ninety four is the Crow in episodes
of Star Trek, Deep Space nine and Voyager. He also
worked a lot as a stunt coordinator I and on
some pretty big films. But I think he does have
lines in here off the top of my head. I
don't know if he's actually saying those lines or if

(44:24):
it's dubbed. But cool looking character. This is our sunglasses angel.
We'll come back to him. Yeah, all right, let's get
to the humans. Our actual narrative protagonist is Detective Thomas Daggett.
That's a great name, played by Elias Kataeus. Here again
hilariously and fittingly nineties deal here where we have a

(44:47):
priest turned homicide detective.

Speaker 3 (44:50):
Yeah, well the city, it'll grind you down. Man.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
So for Kataas, I generally think of him in reference
to two pictures. For first of all Cronenberg's Crash from
ninety six that would come after this movie, but then
also Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in nineteen ninety, in which
he played Casey Jones, the hockey mask wearing hockey stick
wielding vigilanti street vigilantie.

Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, I remember him from that. I thought he was
very cool when I was good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Yeah, he got to kill Shredder with a garbage truck,
as I recall, he remember that detail. Yeah, yeah, like
Shredder falls into a garbage truck and then he's like
oops and he crushes him.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
Shredder's never really dead.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
You can't kill Shredder. He's an idea, right, He's a concept.
But at any rate. He also did the sequels, the
Turtles sequels. Canadian actor of Greek descent. His other credits
include nineteen nineties Almost An Angel, ninety three, Cyboard, two
ninety seven's Gatica, ninety eight's Fallen apt Pupil and The
Thin Red Line, Quite a Year, two thousand and seven, Zodiac,

(45:55):
and twenty ten Shutter Island. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:57):
I remember him in Zodiac. He's one of the he's
one of the police detectives.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Who I think he played a lot of detectives. Yeah, time.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
So this is not an insult to Kotaeus, who I
like in basically everything. I've seen him, and I think
he's a good actor. But I think none of the
human characters in this movie are really allowed to breathe.
I mean, and this character is supposed to be like
he's really the protagonist, you know, And it's the movies

(46:28):
the movie's core, I don't know. Heavier themes are about,
like his loss of faith and his struggle with his
relationship with God and with the understanding of souls, which
is very murky and now it's plotted out at the end,
but I think this the human elements are the weakest
point of the film for me. It's the movie is

(46:51):
clearly having a lot more fun and is showing a
lot more of its virtues when it's just letting the
angels play around and be wise.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah, I absolutely agree. He's a fine actor, but the
role here tends to feel a lot like a video
game point of view Avatar, where we just encounter all
of the interesting and weird characters through him, which, yeah,
is just the sort of movie it is. Yeah, all right,
Other Humans. Virginia Madson plays Catherine born nineteen sixty one.

(47:23):
This is our third Virginia Madson film that we've discussed
on the show, the other two being, of course, nineteen
ninety two is Highlander two and nineteen eighty four's Dune,
in which she plays the Padisha Emperor's daughter, Princess Irulin.
So pretty notable here that, of course Walkin would go
on to play the Padisha Emperor in the more recent
do An adaptation. Yeah, but she's an Oscar nominated actress

(47:46):
two thousand and five Sideways. Other pictures include nineteen eighty
four's Electric Dreams, ninety two's Candy Man, and various other projects.
She is, of course the sister of Michael Madson. Again,
I think she does a perfect fine job here in
what can feel like a second fiddle human role in
a movie about weirdo angels.

Speaker 3 (48:06):
Yeah, same thing I said about Elias Katais I think
applies here. I always like Virginia Madsen. I've liked her
in all the movies we've covered, but her character does
not have the room to breathe here amid all of
the angel business. I think, Yeah, she's portrayed as just
like a basically good person who's there to be, you know,

(48:27):
a helpful, helpful caregiver to this child who becomes endangered,
and it's going to become the focal point of the
moral struggle at the end of the movie.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
That's right. Yeah, So these are the two most human characters.
The ones we're going to get to next are all
Even if they are human, they're changed in a way.
Either they have some sort of either they have a
war criminal soul like hiding their body, or they are
thralls that have been brought back to life to serve angels.

(48:56):
You know, an angel's familiar if you will. Yeah. Yeah,
we have Adam Goldberg playing Jerry born nineteen seventy, American
character actor who frequently plays scenes stealing supporting roles, and
here does a solid job as the movies morbidly comedic
undead thrall that serves Gabriel. So you've seen Goldberg in
tons of things on TV and screen, including ninety sevens

(49:19):
Dazed and Confused, ninety eight Saving Private Ryan, two thousand
and one's Waking Life, and two thousand and seven Zodiac. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:26):
So this is our Renfield number one, yeah, film, and
then Renfield number two is played by Amanda Plumber.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
That's right, we've discussed Amanda Plumber before. Born nineteen fifty seven,
daughter of the late great Christopher Plumber, best known for
pulp fiction and ninety one's The Fisher King. She often
plays characters with a fantastic kind of frantic energy. Just
a wonderful character actor. She was also in an excellent
episode of the nineteen nineties Outer Limits series titled A

(49:54):
Stitch in Time. She plays a time traveling doctor who
is like an avengeful time traveler. She actually won an
Emmy for that. We previously discussed her because she played
a shotgun toting Future nine in nineteen ninety two's.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Free Jack Awesome Get the Meat.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Yeah, I would say the main thing here Amanda Plumber
is as great as always, but she's barely in this.
She's just almost criminally underutilized here.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
It is. It feels like a weird choice. It almost
feels like they would have done more with this character
but ran out of time or something.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure it.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
Happens so late. This is another like Viga Mortenson shows
up in the last twenty minutes of the movie.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
Yeah yeah, like I knew she was rewatching it. It
was like I knew that she was in it, but
then I'd forgotten she was going to be in it
by the time we got to her. All right. Up next,
we have Mariah Shining Dove Snyder playing Mary born nineteen
eighty three, American child actor of Shoshone heritage who was
active in commercials and live musicals. She only has four

(50:57):
TV and film credits. So we have ninety five's the
Brady Bunch of a voice role on an episode of
ninety five's Ah Real Monsters, and then she reprives this
role in Prophecy three, the assent so important part of
the franchise that would say.

Speaker 3 (51:12):
I'm a little trouble that this character would have to
come back for a sequel, like can the Angels just
leave her alone? After this?

Speaker 2 (51:19):
Yeah? Yeah, she goes through a lot here, becomes the
unwitting host for a Grown Man's a grown male war
criminal soul as we'll discuss, but she plays a pimpicook
part here. And speaking of that war criminal, yeah, the
late Colonel Arnold Hawthorne unspeaking role, just playing a corpse here,

(51:40):
we have Patrick McAllister. He just has a couple of
other credits, but they include seventy three's Black Caesar and
seventy four's It's Alive. But he's just a corpse here,
all right, And then real quickly here the composer here
is David Williams, a prolific composer who scored a great
deal of TV and film projects over the years, including
nineteen nineties Shakma The Killer Killer. Was it an April Monkey?

(52:04):
I can't even remember. I've only ever seen the amazing
trailer that's about I've seen Shakma.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
It's a movie I think as Roddy McDowell where they
play some medical researchers or something who get locked in
a building with a with a mad baboon who's just
running around biting everybody.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
Yeah. It's the sort of very sort of film that
I animal film that I really don't want to see,
especially today, But it has an undeniably amazing trailer where
the narrator keeps saying Shakma and it finally just says
Chakma Shakma. Yeah, yeah, very good. Anyway, Williams scored that
He scored Critters three in ninety one, ninety eight, Stantums

(52:43):
two thousand, Supernova, and many others. I would say on
the whole, you know, just an effective score. But it
does have some really nice moments that seem to include
some like indigenous motifs. When we get more into the
late film desert setting that I you know, accurate or not.
That the sonic vibe is pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
All right, are you ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 2 (53:15):
Let's do it. Let's get into the plot of the
prophecy and maybe even figure out what is the prophecy
the title refers to.

Speaker 3 (53:21):
I think I figured that out. I think it's the
lost chapter of the Bible that dude finds later. But
all right, I don't know. We can discuss when we
get to that.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Let's get theological.

Speaker 3 (53:31):
So we get an opening monologue that begins as a
whispered voiceover we hear I remember the First War, the
way the sky burned, the faces of angels destroyed, And
then we open on an overhead shot of a parched,
red desert landscape with the skeleton of an angel lying

(53:51):
in the dust. Kind of rob I think you referred
to it as an angel splat.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Yeah, it's either an angel splat or an abandoned photo
shoot for a nine inch Nails album cover.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
Yes, the skeleton angel splat on the ground. So you've
got wingbones outstretched around a human skeleton, and then standing
over this splat is a long haired human figure. The
camera slowly glides down to the standing figure and sort
of pivots around to bring him into view while the
voiceover continues and it says, I saw a third of

(54:25):
Heaven's legion banished and the creation of Hell. I stood
with my brothers and watched Lucifer fall. But now my
brothers are not brothers, and we have come here where
we are mortal, to steal the dark soul, not yet Lucifers,
to serve our cause. I have always obeyed, but I
never thought the war would happen again.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
So there we have it. The war is happening. This
movie will continue to roll out. There is a second
war in Heaven again, the first being the rebellion of
Lucifer and a third of Heaven's angels. It took place
before the creation of Man. This second war in Heaven
uncertain about when it actually kicked off, but is still ongoing. Yes.

Speaker 3 (55:07):
Oh, and then, by the way, we finally see the
person's face when the camera comes around. It's Eric Stolts
with long hair and a goatee again as a grunge band. Look,
he has pure black eyes or no eyes really, just
like empty hollow sockets. And then he blinks and then
he has normalized.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
Yeah, I guess that's maybe an illusion he puts on
for us uncertain The eyeball question will remain throughout the picture.
Do angels pretend to have eyes in these forms? I'm
not sure?

Speaker 3 (55:34):
So credits play over some sick Gregorian chants and we're
looking at decorations from cathedrals and statues of angels, very
much establishing the angel motif. And then we cut to
the inside of a Catholic church where some type of
ordination creed is being recited by a bishop while a

(55:54):
procession moves down the aisle. I initially typed out this
text because like, are we going to is this important?
Are we gonna need to know this? But no, it's
not important. That it seems to be adapted from the
Catholic prayer of ordination, which is what they say when
new priests are being blessed in their office by a bishop.
So during this ordination ritual, we zoom in on one

(56:17):
of these dudes, and it's Elias Cataeis. He looks very
young here and full of the Holy Spirit. So he
pauses under a crucifix in the church and he stares
at it and takes some deep breaths, and then the
bishop calls out the priests individually by name. They come forward,
they get a blessing. They say, oh Lord, grant this
your servant, the dignity of the priesthood. And I do

(56:40):
have to say, some of these priests and bishops to
me immediately fail the clergy smell test. They just do
not pass as clergy. They look like actors who answered
a casting call.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
Yeah. The church is real, though, which I think is
always impressive for a kind of blasphemous film like this.
It's a Saint Vincent Catholic in La. Again, I think
this is the only thing they actually filmed in La.
End of Days also filmed here.

Speaker 3 (57:06):
It kind of reminds me of the scene in Deep
Red that they shot inside the tomb of Constantina. Yeah. Anyway,
so now it's Eliaskataeus's turn. They call him up. We
learn his name is Thomas. He lies down on the floor,
he kisses the tiles of the floor. But then while
he's doing that, he starts whimpering and crying. Thomas is

(57:26):
having a vision and it's not a nice vision. It's
something coming to him in these agonizing flashes, like images
revealed by lightning, and he sees buff naked men with wings, fighting,
spitting covered in blood.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
Yeah, we guess this is our first glance at some
of these Great Event Horizon style flashes of horrifying Harpie
like angels engaged in torture and death. Thomas begins to
have his doubts. I think at this point this is
not the Christianity he signed up for, and one wonders
why he is given in this vision. Was this like
a mistake where God's like, Oops, that's on me. You

(58:03):
shouldn't have clicked on that attachment. But clearly this is
going to alter his destiny with the church.

Speaker 3 (58:11):
Yeah, yeah, good question. Why is it revealed to him?
I'm not sure, but he screams, and then we cut
to black, and then we get another voiceover. This movie
has quite a number of voiceovers, So the first one
I think was Eric Stults talking you think, yeah, yeah, yeah,
And the second one is the Elias Cotais voiceover. He says,

(58:33):
some people lose their faith because Heaven chose them too little,
But how many lose their faith because Heaven chose them
too much? I've seen things. So it cuts to what's
supposed to be the La Skyline at dusk. We're in
the Big City, now you're saying you think this is
actually Phoenix.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
I think it's Phoenix, but I didn't. I didn't do
some deepen, any kind of deep analysis here.

Speaker 3 (58:56):
Yeah. So the voiceover keeps going. It says, you're later.
Of all the Gospels I learned in seminary school, a
verse from Saint Paul stays with me. It is perhaps
the strangest passage in the Bible in which he writes, quote,
even now in heaven there are angels carrying savage weapons. Now,

(59:16):
longtime listeners probably know this, but in case you're new,
I'm kind of a Bible nut. I'm like, not religious,
but I love the Bible. I just think it's incredibly
interesting for literary and historical reasons. And this immediately threw
a red flag for me. The moment I heard it,
I was like, I do not believe this is in
any text attributed to Paul. Not because like I have

(59:38):
them all memorized or anything, but I just think if
this were aligned from Paul, I would remember it, and
did not remember it. So I looked it up. Turns
out I was right, this is not from Paul's epistles,
and it's actually not in the Bible at.

Speaker 2 (59:52):
All, yeah, I remember being a little They're not really disappointed,
but just mystified, because obviously I looked in the Bible
for this. I saw the film. It was like, oh,
this isn't real. And if it were real, to your point,
you would hear about it all the time. How many
bands would be named angels with savage weapons and so forth.
There may be some anyway because of this movie, but

(01:00:12):
there would be far more.

Speaker 3 (01:00:14):
I mean, I think it's also a little disappointing because
there are really weird, brutal sounding Bible verses that talk
about angels with weapons. They just don't say it like this.
The closest example I could think of is in Revelation
chapter fourteen. Doesn't say the word savage weapons, but it
does talk about angels and other heavenly beings rolling up

(01:00:34):
with sharp sickles. Do you actually do you want me
to read from this or can we skip the Bible reading?

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
Your choice. I'm always down for some weird Bible readings.

Speaker 3 (01:00:43):
Okay, well, at least do part of it. So this
is a new King James version. This is the part
that this may sound familiar to you. It's a famous passage.
Then I looked and behold a white cloud. And on
the cloud sat one like the son of Man, having
on his head a golden crown and in his hand
a sharp sickle. And another angel came out of the temple,

(01:01:04):
crying with a loud voice to him who sat on
the cloud, thrust in your sickle and reap, for the
time has come for you to reap. For the harvest
of the earth is ripe. So he who sat on
the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth, and
the earth was reaped. And then there are more verses
after that, more and more angels with sharp sickles, thrust

(01:01:26):
in your sickle and reap. I think they have to
reap the vine of the earth, for the grapes are
now ripe, a lot of you know. And the wine
press was trampled, and blood came out of the wine press,
all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
Blood wine for everybody, gotcha.

Speaker 3 (01:01:38):
Yeah. Also, not trying to pick on the movie here.
I want to be generous about this because it's just
trying to have a good time. But I will say
throughout the film, Thomas, even though he was supposed to
be a seminary student, talks in a way that does
not indicate a familiarity with the Bible or with Christian theology.
One example is he repeatedly calls the Book of Revelation

(01:02:01):
revelations plural. A lot of people say that, and he
like uses the word prophesize. A lot of people say that,
but like, you know, if you're a theology student, you
would know it is the Book of Revelation or the
Apocalypse of John, or you would say prophesie, not prophesies.
So yeah, it just does it feels like the way

(01:02:22):
a lay person would talk about religion.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
Yeah. Overall, the film is interesting in the way it
seems to approach religion and theology, because at times there
are moments that feel kind of a little more accurate,
Like in general, like I mentioned the Hobo angels, like that,
that's fairly biblically accurate, you know, getting into the idea
that you should you know, I'm blanking on the exact

(01:02:45):
book in line right now, but you know, be nice
to everybody because they might be angels in disguise essentially.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
Oh well, yeah, there are stories in the Bible of
angels appearing, as you know, they are indistinguishable from human travelers,
and you need to show them hospitality. That's there, and
you know the story of Lot, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
Yeah, yeah, recurring theme in the Bible be nice to
travelers and outsiders. Yes, some folks forget that. But then
also there's the part late in the film, I think
where they're talking about the nature of hell and how
hell is not a place of fire and torment, but
it's the torturous aspects of it are due to separation
from God's love, which feels more in line with something

(01:03:24):
he would hear, you know, from a theology class, as
opposed to a devil movie, where other times they're just
you know, obviously making stuff up because it's the rule
of cool and so forth. So at any rate, we're
gonna play fast and loose with the biblical quotes in
this film, for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
So yeah, Thomas is talking about this made up Bible
verse about heavily armed angels, and we see him standing
on the roof of a building looking out over the city.
He's brooding. He's doing detective brood. He looks a good
bit older now and he is of course no longer
dressed like a priest. He's the world, weary, hard living
to detective. He takes a drag off a cigarette you

(01:04:02):
can imagine him with a you know, Jack Daniel's bottle
in his hand, but you don't ever see that, and
it's you know, it's very this city. It'll eat you alive.
But things get cooking pretty quick. After this, Thomas comes
home to his apartment and as soon as he's in
the door, he sees grunge Eric Stolts wearing the long
trench coat, perched up like a bird on the back

(01:04:24):
of a chair in a gravitationally impossible way. And this
is the part I found this to be truly hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
Yeah, I think the core idea here is that angels
again are the truly inhuman, hideous harpy creatures, and so
of course they're gonna perch. But we can also later
on the film we'll learn that angels cannot drive automobiles.
I'm assuming they can't use technology at all on the whole.
So maybe one idea is they can't use chairs, or
maybe they just largely choose not to use them because

(01:04:55):
humans made them. You know, maybe even as even with Simon,
who about as human friendly as the angels get, maybe
he's just like I would prefer not to What is that.

Speaker 3 (01:05:05):
I didn't think about that, But yeah, I can't use
human technology. So they can't even use chairs. But they
use doors. That's a human technology.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
They have to use those. But with chairs they go like,
you know, I'm gonna be obtuse and I'm going to
perch on it, because perching is what God intends.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
They use stairs.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
That's human technology, like real creations of God perch. Humans
decided to make chairs, and then God it's like, oh,
that's great. You did such a great job making chairs.
You can set in them. The angels are having none
of that.

Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
So Eric Stoltz is reading a book in this pose
and Thomas draws his gun and starts giving him tough
guy talk. He's like, don't even move, buddy, and our
heavenly Stults is not intimidated. He just starts monologuing. He says,
everyone thinks they know what heaven is, like Heaven isn't
heaven anymore?

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
Not one of the better mini monologues in the film.

Speaker 3 (01:05:58):
But eventually reveals that he knows Thomas's backstory. He knows
that he was once a priest training for the priesthood
and that he quit when he had a vision of
a war in heaven during his ordination. Stolts also knows
that Thomas researched and wrote a thesis on the subject
of angels. And then I love this exchange. Stultz says,

(01:06:21):
do you still believe any of it? And Thomas says,
you're asking me as a cop. So they kind of
banter back and forth without resolving the question, and then
suddenly we cut away to a very nineties movie landscape
of fog and blue filters, and we see another guy

(01:06:42):
in a long coat, kind of dressed like Stalts, with
long hair, coming down the length of an abandoned back alley.
He is wearing his sunglasses in the dark, and he
stops and he sniffs the air like a dog. This
we will learn is the angel Usial. Also, this guy
ends up doing a bird perch up on a street
maintenance sign and then he stays like that all through

(01:07:04):
the night until morning, looking at the window of this
like warehouse district apartment.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
Yeah, they're kind of like gargoyles, they are.

Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So we see inside the apartment
that is being staked out by this angel, and it's
Eric Stolt's coming home, so I guess this is his place.
He uses he has an apartment. He dumps out the
contents of his pockets on a table and it's like
keys and antique coins, a brass pocket watch, so that's technology,

(01:07:35):
and then a clipping of a newspaper article and then
he stops. He senses something is wrong. He sniffs the air.
It's like, can you smell what the Lord God is cooking?
It's an angel coming to kill me. So suddenly Sunglasses
Angel ussil here jumps in from the outside through the window,
smashes glass everywhere, and at the same time, Eric Stolts

(01:07:56):
senses that he's coming and jumps up so that they
collide in midair and start wrestling.

Speaker 2 (01:08:01):
Yeah. Yeah, so again we have some strong shades of
Highlander here, Yes, with one supernatural combatant ambushing another with
life force on the line between the two of them.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
Gregory Wyden had a thing like he was really into
the idea of human like beings that are something other
than human blending in with us and being at war
with each other.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
Yeah. I mean it was a massive success with Highlander.
Why not re explore it here. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:30):
So, anyway, while these angels are fighting, the Sunglasses Angel
calls Eric Stolt Simon's that's how we learn his name
and then accuses him of having found it and trying
to keep it from us. What is it? Who is us?
Unclear at this point, but they keep fighting and eventually
Simon impales the other angel's throat on a shard of

(01:08:51):
glass from the window. This happened in the last movie
we watched. Yes, this was the first murder in Deep
Red as well.

Speaker 2 (01:08:57):
That's right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:08:59):
Yeah, But anyway, Rob, I don't know if you have
any particular notes on this fight scene. One of the
main things that struck me about it is how they
are scratching at each other with their fingernails, like digging
at each other's hearts and tearing at the flesh on
the chest.

Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
Yeah. So basically we learn here for sure that angels
are gritty and savage. There's nothing refined about holy angelic warfare.
There are not going to be any swords of gleaming
light here. It's going to be just let me get
my fingernails in your chest so I can rip that
heart out.

Speaker 3 (01:09:31):
Just trying to mutual heart digging going on. But Simon prevails.
He doesn't well, first he impales the guy's throat on
the window, and then he digs his heart out, and
then he also takes off the guy's sunglasses and reveals
he has no eyes, just the black hollow sockets. So
Simon throws him out the window. The other angel lands

(01:09:52):
in the alley below and then is immediately hit by
a car. And did you know this? I first noticed
in this scene that the angels all seem to have
their fingernails painted black.

Speaker 2 (01:10:03):
Do you know what's on there? Yeah? I think it's
just in general angels have cool nails. Or also maybe
it's sort of to very, you know, inexpensively imply that
their fingernails are sharp or something without actually putting like
crazy nails on their fingers.

Speaker 3 (01:10:18):
Or maybe they're just really dirty because they're always digging
each other's hearts out.

Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
That's true, it's just good clotted blood.

Speaker 3 (01:10:24):
Angels don't wash their hands because that would be technology.
Can't use a faucet anyway. We cut to later. The
police are here setting up a crime scene around the
angel's body. What are the odds? Our friend Thomas is well,
actually no, I made a note about this, but I
was wrong. At first. We think he's the detective assigned
to the case. We learned that he usually works the

(01:10:47):
night shift. But why was he called here? Actually he
was not assigned the case. He was called because they
found a copy of his thesis about angels in the
apartment above. And this scene has a lot of stereotypical
cynical cop banter, so making jokes about the dead guy.
They're like, maybe his eyeballs are in the radiator, and

(01:11:08):
a lot of pining for retirement, you know, just two
years till retirement. Also in the apartment, Thomas finds a
newspaper obituary from Chimney Rock, Arizona, about the death of
a man named Colonel Arnold Hawthorne.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
So that's the kind of investigation that Simon's been up
to down here. Maybe as he's been looking through the obits.

Speaker 3 (01:11:30):
He's just reading o bits from I guess everywhere, trying
to find like who's the worst person who died. And
so then we go to Chimney Rock and we check
in at a local elementary school I think it's the
Reservation School here in Chimney Rock, and we meet a

(01:11:50):
new character, Catherine, played by Virginia Madsen, and she's directing
a choir of children performing a version of Ave Maria.
One of the children in the choir is a little
girl named Mary, and after the performance we get to
see Mary and Catherine bonding and having a good relationship,
like they bond over their shared desire of cake. And

(01:12:12):
then meanwhile, somewhere else in Chimney Rock, we're inside a
church illuminated only by candle light, totally empty. There's nobody here,
and at the head of the chapel, the body of
Colonel Arnold Hawthorne, the guy from the obituary, is laid
out for display in an open casket draped with the
American flag. There are no mourners, nobody here to visit

(01:12:34):
except Eric Stults Simon, the Angel. Simon comes walking down
the aisle clutching his chest like he's injured. I guess
Uziel was kind of digging at him to they were
mutual digging again, so he's, you know, he's hurt, and
he approaches the body, leans over and starts French kissing it.
And they add in some sound effects I think to

(01:12:54):
make clear that it's not just a kiss, like Simon,
it is like wind rushing and hissings sound. So Simon
is sucking the soul out of casket man, kind of
like letting the air out of a car's tires. But
that did actually make me wonder physical questions like what
is the pressure? What the psi of a soul and
a dead body? And is there a valve that holds

(01:13:16):
it in place before the angel comes and lets it
out and sucks it?

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
Well? Will We learned later there's the size of a
bread box. But no, it's bigger than a bread It's bigger,
bigger than a bread box, bigger. Yeah, so that means
but what pressure is a volume.

Speaker 3 (01:13:29):
Of gas bigger than a bread box? How do you say?

Speaker 2 (01:13:33):
With the yeah? And again it gives down to like
under what pressure? Terrestrial pressure, celestial pressure? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:13:48):
Simon, uh, you know. He sucks the soul out, and
then he goes hiking around Chimney Rock with his coat
folded up tight, still clutching his mid section. He eventually
breaks into a First, I thought it was in a
abandoned building, but then I realized it's the like abandoned
upper floor of the school building.

Speaker 2 (01:14:07):
Yeah, we learned later that a lot of jobs were
lost in the town. It's been largely depopulated, so the school,
a lot of the school is just kind of shuddered,
and that's where we are here.

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):
Yeah. Yeah, so he lies down with some rats there
to have a rest.

Speaker 2 (01:14:21):
Yeah, and again this is kind of a recurring motif
in this film, angels as wandering hoboes, which I actually
have a note here Hebrews thirteen to two. Be not
forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unaware.

Speaker 3 (01:14:37):
One of the most important and most emphasized messages throughout
the Bible is to show hospitality and kindness to strangers
and foreigners.

Speaker 2 (01:14:46):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:14:49):
Anyway, so we go on to another scene with Detective Thomas.
He gets info about the dead angel from the medical examiner.
The murder victim here had no eyes ever, they say,
not removed. Oh, by the way, the medical examiner is
Banya from Seinfeld.

Speaker 2 (01:15:09):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, And I believe this actor comes
back in subsequent films. They're like, he's so great, we
must have more angel autopsies in the sequels.

Speaker 3 (01:15:18):
He's always he's cracking a lot of crude jokes. But
so yeah, Banya is like, this guy had no eyes ever,
they weren't removed. He didn't even have optic nerves. So
he's just a no eyes model of human says he
has the blood of a fetus, bones with no growth rings,
both male and female sex organs, and a scar on
his neck showing a trident symbol. And then in the

(01:15:42):
lining of his coat they found a hand copied Latin
manuscript of the Bible inscribed with the same symbol as
his neck. And then the Bible has a bookmark stuck
on a page toward the end, which is Revelation chapter
twenty three. But there is no twenty third chapter in
the Book of Revelation. The last chapter is number twenty two.

Speaker 2 (01:16:04):
What I think you had to be part of the
kickstarter to get that chapter.

Speaker 3 (01:16:08):
Bonus chapter. We have bonus content stretch rewards. Yeah, so
Thomas immediately sets toward translating the new chapter of Revelation.
We see him in his study working through the night,
and the translation includes the following lines he's reading out
loud to himself quote and there were angels who could
not accept the lifting of man above them, and like Lucifer,

(01:16:32):
rebelled against the armies of the loyal archangel Michael, and
there rose a second war in Heaven. Now, once I
saw the whole movie, this actually made more sense, because
I think the implication is just that this second war
in heaven has been going on for a long time.
But at first I was really confused, because this is

(01:16:52):
describing something happening now, like the second War in heaven,
and why would that be part of the revelation given
to John of pat Mos in the first century but
phrased in the past tense. But I think the implication is, like,
the whole time humans have existed, this second war in
Heaven has just been going on in the background.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.

Speaker 3 (01:17:13):
Also, we learn from research mode Thomas finds the symbol,
finds that symbol carved on the dead angel's neck and
inscribed in the Bible. He finds that it is the
symbol of the angel Uziel, the strength of God, one
of God's soldiers and the lieutenant to the archangel Gabriel.
And then when we get this information, Thomas gasps and

(01:17:34):
he says, Gabriel that means something.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
I think the book that he's looking at identifies Gabriel
as the Angel of Death, though I believe he's generally
presented as the Herald of God. So for instance, in
the Bible, in the New Testament, he comes to the
virgin Mary and tells her that she has been chosen
by God. Can you imagine that scene with walkins Gabriel
of being the one to come and tell Mary what's up?

Speaker 3 (01:17:59):
Yeah, Well, if you're having trouble imagining it, this is
the part of the movie to start watching so you
can inform your imagination, because this is when Gabriel finally
shows up. It's like twenty five minutes into the film.
The cock of the walk Baby, here he is.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
And he.

Speaker 3 (01:18:16):
Appears first, I think, in the alley outside the crime scene,
and then he bursts into the room. He looks at
the same time haunted and bored when we first meet him.
So he cuts through the crime scene tape and he
starts doing his own investigation, which, as we said earlier,
involves a lot of licking and sniffing. He licks a

(01:18:37):
bunch of gore off of a table and then stands up,
gazes into the distance, and says, Simon, so he can
taste him.

Speaker 2 (01:18:47):
He's on the hunt.

Speaker 3 (01:18:49):
Here we also meet a new character. This is Jerry
played by Adam Goldberg, depicted as living in a squalid,
bachelor flavored apartment of sadness and shame. They're like you know,
pin up posters and porno magazines everywhere, and he uses
an old maggot covered pizza as an ash tray. Things
are not going great for Jerry, though. This is another

(01:19:11):
thing that made more sense thinking about it in retrospect,
because maybe the squalor of his apartment is supposed to
reflect the fact that he is and has been undead
for some time.

Speaker 2 (01:19:23):
Yeah. Yeah, it's related later on that the scenario seems
to be this that Gabriel can refuse to claim a
soul and send it back into the body and take
them on as kind of an undead thrall, and it
only seems to work on individuals who have attempted to
take their own life or succeeded in taking their own life.

(01:19:43):
But yet, as dark as that sounds, this character of
Jerry is mostly a comedic character and it largely works.
It's actually pretty They have some fairly humorous though you know,
dark darkly humorous back and forth here.

Speaker 3 (01:19:58):
Jerry is eager to get on the afterlife and he
is very tired of being commanded around by Gabriel, and
Gabriel is not exactly nice to him.

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):
Yeah, and he's probably having to do mostly things like
I need you to drive from me, obviously, but then
also like I need you to use a telephone and
so forth, which, interestingly enough, you know I've heard you
do hear similar things about Christopher Walken, like he apparently
doesn't use a lot like modern communication technology. So one wonders,
you know, how far from the truth is this performance.

Speaker 3 (01:20:29):
So later in Chimney Rock, we see some kids from
the neighborhood playing hide and seek in the abandoned part
of the school building, and here they come across Simon.
One of the kids is Mary, the girl we met earlier.
Simon tells Mary that you know, he needs a place
to rest and to hide, and he asks her not
to tell anybody that he's here. She says okay and

(01:20:50):
offers to bring him something to eat. More in the
Bible research subplot, Thomas talks to his coworker Banya again
about the case. He says, okay, carbon dating came back.
Usil's Bible manuscript is not a fake. It's from the
second century, making it the oldest Bible in existence. Thomas

(01:21:11):
has translated a bunch of new stuff from this extra
chapter of Revelation. It is a story about the Second
War in Heaven, which is about humans. Quote, when God
gave us a soul, some angels became jealous and they
started this war. And as far as we know, the
Second War in Heaven is still going on. And then
he reads a passage that says, quote, and there will

(01:21:32):
be a dark soul, and this soul shall eat other
dark souls and so become their inheritor. This soul will
not rest in an angel, but a man, and he
shall be a warrior. And then Banya responds, nice, very nice,
but yeah. So they have some theology talk, like, for example,

(01:21:54):
they talk about why God doesn't just get rid of
the bad angels, and Thomas says maybe he can't, maybe
he won't. Unresolved, There is a cool scene here where
Gabriel strolls into the police Morgue makes the guard. He
does the stranger's like sleep now and makes the guard sleep.
He finds Uziel's body, anoints it with some kind of

(01:22:17):
liquid and then points to it with his back turned
and it bursts into flames on the floor.

Speaker 2 (01:22:22):
Total badass moment from Chris walk in here. Just Ooze
is supernatural minutes. I love it.

Speaker 3 (01:22:28):
Back in Chimney Rock, we check in with Catherine, Mary,
and Simon the Angel. Mary has been helping Simon hide
out on the upper floor of the school. She's been
very nice to him. She brings him Coca cola even
angels love it, and Catherine the teacher find I don't
know if that's paid product placement. That would be really
funny if it is. But Katherine the teacher finds them

(01:22:50):
hanging out together and tries to tell Simon that he
has to leave, and Simon Simon sort of commit I
don't know if he's doing some kind of intimidation mind
and control on her. He like sends her away, and
then in a very weird and unpleasant scene, he spits
the soul that he sucked out of the coffin colonel
into Mary.

Speaker 2 (01:23:10):
Yeah. This ends up making sense later, but in the
moment is just super creepy because you're like, wait, isn't
this the good angel This is the good angelic character?
But it'll wait more since later, yeah, because we learned that, Yeah,
that's what he's doing is he's spitting the dark soul
into her. He's hiding the dark soul of the deceased
war criminal in this little girl.

Speaker 3 (01:23:30):
And then the next time we see Mary, she is
coughing and acting sick, so obviously the evil soul is
not treating her well, so Catherine takes care of her,
takes her back to her grandmother's house. Let's see. Oh, next,
we're gonna have the characters start to converge in time
and space. So you know, the uzi Ol Angel body

(01:23:51):
is now just a charred mass on the floor of
the morgue. So the only lead Thomas has left to
work is to head to Chimney Rock and figure this out.
And it's same time Gabriel finds the Colonel Hawthorne obituary
among Simon's things and he heads for Chimney Rock also,
and he takes Jerry with him to do his driving.
In his front work, there's a scene where they're on

(01:24:13):
the way to Chimney Rock and Gabriel makes Jerry stop
the car and he goes, I can always smell a graveyard.
It just like runs up a hill into a graveyard
and immediately finds the grave. Has Jerry dig up. This
is the grave of Colonel Hawthorne, and Walkin is doing
the bird perch on the gravestone here, and when Jerry

(01:24:36):
gets the body dug up. Gabriel gets down there and
he goes, you're looking at the meanest, sickest, cleverest talking monkey.
I love him.

Speaker 2 (01:24:45):
This is a great weird scene, like the two actors
who have great chemistry, and we get walk in cemetery yoga.

Speaker 3 (01:24:51):
So yeah, and gabl he sniffs the dead body a
good bit and then tries to suck the soul out,
but no dice because the soul is already gone. Where
could it be? Gabriel is back into detective mode. He's
got to find the soul. So first he tracks down
Simon hiding in the school. More bird perching here. Simon
tries to get away, but I think Gabriel is the

(01:25:14):
more powerful angel, so you know, all the other angels
are kind of at his mercy one on one and
he says, so where's the soul? You know, bigger than
a bread box used to occupy the recently dead Colonel Hawthorne.
This is the part about the soul is bigger than
a bread box. I don't know. We never see a soul. Well,
maybe we do when the fire skeleton comes out at

(01:25:35):
the end, in which case the soul is the size
of a human body.

Speaker 2 (01:25:37):
It kind of it's like a it's like a gas.
It just expands to fill the entire ring.

Speaker 3 (01:25:42):
Yeah. So here there's there's a bunch of back and
forth between Gabriel and Simon. I don't know. I took
down some of this dialogue because I didn't know if
we would want to talk about it to explain the
plot at all, But I don't know how much it
really illuminates. There's like Gabriel wants the soul. He wants
to he wants to end the war with the soul.

(01:26:05):
The soul is a weapon of some kind, because he says,
I bow to no human in Heaven, and Simon says,
I'm so tired of this war. Simon talks as if
he's not part of the war. We talked about that earlier,
but it's also kind of implied that he is on
the opposite side of it as Gabriel. And you know,

(01:26:25):
they reminisce about when they fought together against Lucifer and
his army in the First War of Heaven. I guess
they threw down the Devil and his angels, and Simon
says they wanted to be God's Gabriel says, I don't
want to be a god, Simon. I just want to
make it like it was before the lie, when he
loved us best. And then Simon starts touching Gabriel's face.

(01:26:47):
They're kind of caressing each other, and Simon says, when
was it you lost your grace? I'd like to help
your old friend, but I can't. I'm not sure who's
right who's wrong, But it doesn't matter. Sometimes you just
have to do what you're told. That's who we are are.
And then Gabriel has a great cold line, He's got
a twinkle in his eye, and he says, you know
the great thing about a conversation like this, you never

(01:27:07):
have to have it again. And so he just like
uses angel magic to subject Simon to fire torture and
then he he just starts burning him and kind of
turns it off and on and is like, I can
do this all day, Simon.

Speaker 2 (01:27:23):
Yeah. First of all, great energy between these two, and
I really love there back and forth here. There's a
fair amount of lore that for this film that is
that is dished out here, like the energy. I love
that last line. And then we just get this wonderfully
savage scene with some terrifying fire effects. So you very
much loved this as well. The way he just kind

(01:27:44):
of like touches him, makes him burst into fire and
just kind of like throws him across the room.

Speaker 3 (01:27:49):
But he never gets the answer, so eventually he just
pulls Simon's hard out like the terminator. Meanwhile, we check
in with our human characters. Mary is still sick because
of the evil soul. Her grandmother has called a tribal
healer who is performing a ritual over her body. They're
trying to figure out if she must have what they
call a sing, which is implied to be a form

(01:28:10):
of exorcism. Meanwhile, Catherine goes through Mary's crayon drawings and
finds a bunch of disturbing scenes of violence in crayon,
including gunfights and people impaled on stakes.

Speaker 2 (01:28:22):
Yeah, Mary's been drawing war crimes, yes, and that's going
to be important.

Speaker 3 (01:28:26):
And she's having nightmares about Colonel Hawthorne. So this is
the next research segment of the movie. Doubting Thomas arrives
in Chimney Rock to pick up the trail. He finds
that somebody has dug up the grave of Colonel Hawthorne
and also finds the charred Eric Stolts in the school,
he meets Catherine, the teacher, and learns sort of the

(01:28:48):
whole backstory with Simon hiding in the school, his encounter
with Mary, and Mary's current condition, so he's kind of
all caught up now. And at one point he asks
Katherine about Old Hawthorne. He's like, did you go to
his funeral? She says everybody did? He lived here, And
he says, did he have any dark secrets? And she

(01:29:08):
says there are no secrets in the small town, mister Daggett,
dark or otherwise. I was like, that's obviously untrue.

Speaker 2 (01:29:17):
Yeah, it's weird how they're laying this out, because I
feel like they also established that nobody liked him and
he didn't like anybody. It looked like earlier nobody came
to his funeral except the angel that came to steal
his soul. But they're also like, yeah, oh yeah, everybody
knew him. Yeah, of course we went to his funeral.
There's nothing going on that night. It's a small town.

Speaker 3 (01:29:34):
Also, during this conversation, they're like having it on the
playground at the school, and then we pull back the
camera to reveal Christopher Walken Bird perching on the school building.
Watching them from above.

Speaker 2 (01:29:45):
Nice.

Speaker 3 (01:29:46):
This was great funny to me again, but also more
research mode where Thomas has to go figure out what
the deal with Hawthorne is, and so he goes to
his house starts digging through his stuff. Hawthorne apparently he
kept like a special war crimes keepsake chest. It's full
of clippings of newspaper articles about stuff he did in

(01:30:08):
the Korean War with headlines like court accuses Hawthorne of
human sacrifices. And then and then Thomas gets out of
film canister that is like a real he watches it
somehow and a projector that is documenting the atrocities and
his subsequent court martial. Kind of sketchy about exactly what

(01:30:29):
all of the charges were, but there are suggestions that
he was like Vlad the Impaler, he like put people
on stakes, and that he ate the bodies of his
victims and he cut their faces off and made masks.

Speaker 2 (01:30:40):
And so the government was like, we're gonna dishonorably discharge
you for this. You have to go retire in Arizona.

Speaker 3 (01:30:46):
Yeah exactly. Yeah, So he did did all of these
horrors and then just it's like nough of that he heads, yeah,
heads to Arizona. And so after this Thomas he goes
to a nearby Catholic church where he sits in a
pew and he relives his visions of like the buff
naked hunks, gargling blood and having the war in heaven.

(01:31:06):
And here's our first meeting of Christopher Walkin and our protagonist. Here,
Christopher Walken is sitting right behind him. It's like that
scene in Home Alone where Kevin meets the old man,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:31:17):
Yeah, and of course very much like the scene in
Highlander where the Kurgan and McLeod and you're right on ground.

Speaker 3 (01:31:25):
And why didn't have had some things? Yeah, he wanted
to come back to.

Speaker 2 (01:31:30):
Also, of note, Gabriel is sitting here, so this does
prove that angels can use human share technology or at
least pubased.

Speaker 3 (01:31:39):
The first thing Gabriel says to him is he says,
it's unusual seeing someone your age in a church on
a week night. Don't get me wrong. I think it's
a sign of excellent character. And then he starts kind
of threatening Thomas. Thomas doesn't know what's going on, and
Gabriel one of the lines is do you know how
you got that dent on your on your upper lip

(01:31:59):
way back before you were born. I told you a secret.
Then I put my finger there and I said, sh.

Speaker 2 (01:32:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:32:08):
I mean whatever else do you think about this movie?
A lot of walking scenes and lines are just great.

Speaker 2 (01:32:13):
Yeah, I mean it will be already. I think this
is already a creepy line, but then Walkin brings it
to the next level, like tremendous.

Speaker 3 (01:32:21):
What's the may with the horn blowing scene after this?
Like got all the kids blowing a trumpet?

Speaker 2 (01:32:27):
You know this is you know, first of all your
creepy outside of character interacting with children always good good,
But then also yeah, this is the horn of judgment, right,
this is the horn that Gabriel will blow and bring
about the end times. And he's just letting kids play
with it. Here one of them gives a proper tuote
on the thing and like it makes a window explode

(01:32:48):
on the upper floor of the school.

Speaker 3 (01:32:50):
Is there a reason he's having the kids blow the horn?
Is he trying to find which one of them has
the evil soul?

Speaker 2 (01:32:56):
That's what he's doing? Yes, okay, yeah, because he also
is like he looks in one of their mouths and
he's like, let me take a look. Nope, not you.
So he suspects that a child is holding the soul
and there's nothing more to be done but to just
go around and look in all the children's mouths.

Speaker 3 (01:33:11):
Anyway, Catherine arrives on scene and is like something, this
is not good and tries to make him leave. Also
in this Jerry the Familiar is like melting at this point.
He has brundlefly syndrome going on. Yeah, and then also
I guess because he is undead sort of. And then
after this there is a scene where Catherine and Thomas

(01:33:33):
are asking Mary about what Simon the Angel told her
before he died. She doesn't reveal it, but she does
temporarily become possessed by the spirit of Colonel Hawthorne and
just starts monologuing about how cool it is to be
evil and do murder. Yeah, and then we learn we
learn Mary's grandmother is arranging to have her go through

(01:33:54):
a healing and exorcism ritual on their tribal lands, and
Catherine asks Thomas do you know what's going on here?
And Thomas gives, I don't know. You see what we
think of this response, he says, did you ever notice
how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone
or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing,

(01:34:15):
he sent an angel. Did you ever wonder what a
creature like that must be? Like a whole existence spent
praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood?
Would you ever really want to see an angel? I
have this I think highlights a kind of tension in
how I'm receiving the movie, which is that, on one hand,

(01:34:37):
the way it interfaces with the actual characters in plot
feels kind of awkward and hokey. But at the same time,
the core premise I think is a very cool one
to explore, Like, you know, the actual how truly frightening
it would be if you took the concept of angels
as independent being seriously.

Speaker 2 (01:34:56):
Yeah, Like this line feels like it could have been
a part of the initial pitch for the film, Like,
imagine what it would be to actually meet an angel?
And I do like the one wing dipped in blood? Yeah, though,
I should say sometimes God just sends one when he
needs someone to be wrestled. Yeah, He's like, I'm not
going to wrestle someone myself, send in an angel to
do it.

Speaker 3 (01:35:14):
I think after this speech. By the way, Catherine says,
why are you asking me this? Yeah, Catherine, why He
seems to be kind of on something on another thing.
But eventually they're like, okay, the angels want Colonel Hawthorne,
and Colonel Hawthorne's soul is in Mary, so they basically
work out what's going on. They're ready to team up now, too,

(01:35:37):
so they decide to hunt down the Scabriel guy and
find out what his deal is. They track him to
an abandoned mind shaft. He's not in there right now,
but they find a sleeping bag and a bunch of
trash and all kinds of weird writing on the walls
of the tunnel, which Thomas identifies as angelic script, and
then while looking at it, they both have a horrible

(01:35:57):
vision of a great war in heaven. They see this
landscape of death with flags and banners and a sunrise
breaking over a mountain and the light falling on thousands
of bodies of winged angels impaled on spikes. It's a
pretty horrifying image, and it it has the feeling I like,

(01:36:17):
the way it looks in the movie has the feeling
of like a kind of one of those Romantic era
paintings of a battlefield.

Speaker 2 (01:36:25):
Yeah, and this we also see one that's kind of
like in the room with them. Like the vision expands
where we get one angelic being impale and the spike
like snarling and screaming.

Speaker 3 (01:36:35):
And stuff, and Thomas shouts no, and he throws a
lantern against the wall and it explodes and the vision ceases.
But what's he saying no about? Like, no, I don't
want to see that.

Speaker 2 (01:36:45):
I guess yes, like cancel vision, do not accept Marcus
spam navigate back.

Speaker 3 (01:36:51):
Yeah. Y. So Thomas and Catherine conclude that the secret
bonus chapter of revelation was right. There was another in
heaven and it's still going on. Gabriel is an angel.
I guess they're catching up to what we already know.
But he wants to get the soul so they can
win the war. So they go back to Mary's home
to protect her. But here there's a confrontation because Gabriel

(01:37:14):
is here. He explains to them that yes, he is
going to have to rip this child into pieces and
steal her soul. But he says, Thomas, you're a good
Catholic boy. You should be on my side. And then
they start to fight. Gabriel's servant Jerry, is killed in
the fight, and he thanks Thomas for shooting him. He's like, see,
I'm out of here again the vampire's familiar archetype, and

(01:37:37):
Gabriel gives a bunch of he monologues a lot here.
He's like, I'm an angel, you know, I destroy everything.
I turn cities into salt. I rip your soul apart,
and then he says, the only thing you can count
on in your existence is never understanding.

Speaker 2 (01:37:51):
Why chilling a little monologue from work. Yeah, this is
one I think they just pops up in the trailer
for the film.

Speaker 3 (01:37:58):
That's not a bad little taunt. Yeah, It's like, I'm
gonna be doing stuff you're never gonna understand.

Speaker 2 (01:38:04):
Yeah, and this is not your place to understand it.
You were not meant to understand.

Speaker 3 (01:38:08):
So there's more fighting. Eventually, Thomas and Catherine together manage
to wound to Gabriel and escape with Mary. Once again.
Gabriel seems he's kind of like the Terminator. He's not
invincible against conventional weapons, but he is unusually tough. Oh
and Mary now has knowledge about angels somehow. She says

(01:38:28):
angels on Earth are not immortal, but to kill them
for good you have to cut their hearts out. And
there's a great little moment here where they they're like
taking away Christopher Walkin's body and he like opens his
eyes and winks at them out of a carridoor. So anyway,

(01:38:51):
our good characters make their way up into the high country.
They go up onto a butte to the settlement of
an unnamed tribe overlooking the desert, where the local elders
begin to sing and chant over Mary in a ritual
to get the evil spirit out of her. And then
here they're like, let's introduce some new characters.

Speaker 2 (01:39:11):
Yeah, he said, twenty minutes left in the film or something,
just like let him out.

Speaker 3 (01:39:15):
So we get a scene of the recruitment of Amanda
Plumber at a hospital playing a character named Rachel, and
Gabriel shows up at her hospital bed and is like, hey,
you work for me now, and she starts crying, and
he does the same thing he was saying to Jerry
whenever he would start crying. He would say, don't start
with that, Like, Gabriel can't stand hearing people cry.

Speaker 2 (01:39:36):
Yeah again, Amanda Plumber kind of criminally underused here, but yeah,
but she's good.

Speaker 3 (01:39:42):
Also, up at the up on the butte, they the
human characters Catherine and Thomas meet Lucifer. Yep, here's the devil.
Lucifer is also perching like the angel doing the bird perch.
He says like, hello, Catherine, we must talk, and she says,
oh my God, and he says, God, God is love.

(01:40:06):
I don't love you. And he gives some pretty good
monologues here where it's strange that he is not a
good character, but he ends up helping the protagonists because
they have a common enemy.

Speaker 2 (01:40:21):
Yeah, Mortenson's Lucifer is interesting because you know, Gabriel has
taken on some of the attributes that you might normally
expect for a Satan character to have, and so we
clearly have to differentiate who Lucifer is and what he is,
And we end up with this again, like this mean, nasty, dangerous,
kind of scatological, warped figure, but one who is not

(01:40:45):
as absolutely anti human as Gabriel and his rebels. Like
maybe he's like, I hate angels more than I hate people,
and therefore I'm willing to help you guys out with
this one. But the nature of the help is a
little shaky.

Speaker 3 (01:41:00):
And I like that Satan always has a little event
horizon ghoul with him, a guy he's in a little
you know, hood, and cloak who's going to He's a
little bit cinnabite, a little bit something else.

Speaker 2 (01:41:14):
Yeah. I don't know if this is another fallen angel
or this is like a tortured soul, but it's like
Lucifer's height man. In fact, they're just in the background
to sort of back up what Lucifer's laying down.

Speaker 3 (01:41:24):
But Lucifer during this encounter provides wisdom that Thomas needs.
I didn't fully understand how all of this worked out
in the end, but Vigo suggests that Thomas defeat Gabriel
by causing him to question his faith. He says, use
it like an acting coach. So anyway, they sense that

(01:41:46):
Gabriel is now coming. He's in a car being driven
by Amanda Plumber. He's on this long road approaching the butte. Meanwhile,
inside the nearby house, Mary's family and friends are doing
the ritual to heal her and get the bad spirit out,
and this comes up to a final showdown. One thing
is that it involves a trap, a physical trap. I've
mentioned this on the show A lot. I just always

(01:42:07):
love setting a trap for the monster in the final
showdown that I don't know that just always gets is
like the thing from another world Predator Nightmare on Elm Street.
I always love it when there's a trap for the monster.

Speaker 2 (01:42:18):
M yep yep. In this case, is in human ingenuity
to overcome an inhuman folk?

Speaker 3 (01:42:23):
Yeah, well, first to overcome a car. They like, stretch
a chain across the road and they wreck Gabriel's car.

Speaker 2 (01:42:29):
Now is Gabriel ejected? He's not wearing a seat belt?

Speaker 3 (01:42:32):
Yes, yeah. He gets launched out of the car and
he comes to Tomas saying, he goes, nice move, beautifully done. Tommy,
you ought to come work for me upstairs. I could
get you in now. You'll love it. No one tells
you when to go to bed. You eat all the
ice cream you want. You get to kill all day
and all night, just like an angel.

Speaker 2 (01:42:50):
I think he's having a laugh.

Speaker 3 (01:42:51):
Here he is and Thomas here, here's where he starts.
He starts kind of getting him. He's trying to, you know,
make him, make him question, make him question his faith.
He says, I'm not an angel, just a man. But
I've got something you don't a soul. And this is
a little weird because I don't know you can tell
me if I'm wrong here, Rob, unless there's something I missed.

(01:43:12):
There's really no work done earlier in the film to
establish this as an important distinction. There is a line
earlier about when God gave humans a soul, the angels
became jealous. But now this is establishing not just that
humans have a soul, but that angels don't have souls.
What does it mean for them not to have a soul?

(01:43:33):
What is a soul in the context of this story.

Speaker 2 (01:43:36):
Yeah, I feel like we're left to do the legwork
on trying to figure out what a soul is in
the context of the Prophecy franchise. Does it mean like
a part of God is in you? Like? What's their
theological approach to this? Well, all we know is that
it's bigger than a bread.

Speaker 3 (01:43:51):
Box, right, Yes, So this makes Gabriel mad. He wants
to inflict pain on Thomas, but Thomas keeps taunting him.
He says, your war is a lie. He says, I
know what it's like to be you. I know what
it's like to be ignored, pushed aside, and then he
asserts you hate God. You hate him just a little
bit because you're jealous, because he loves something more than you,

(01:44:12):
something with the soul.

Speaker 2 (01:44:13):
I like this kind of he was able to channel
a little to Nero there, so you hate him just
a little bit, just.

Speaker 3 (01:44:19):
A little bit, Yeah, just a little bit. And then
he also says, if you wanted to prove your side
was right so badly, why don't you just ask him?
Why don't you just ask God? And then Gabriel gets
a little bit vulnerable and he says, because he doesn't
talk to me anymore. This is another one of these
like points back in the column of interesting premise for

(01:44:41):
a movie for me, Like, there is a war in heaven,
but whenever you imagine a war in heaven, you imagine
God is involved, is maybe not physically fighting in an
embodied form, but is a partisan in the war in
heaven and has you know, is interacting with at least
one side of this war. But the implication here is

(01:45:03):
that there's a war in heaven and maybe God is
nowhere to be found, not involved in the conflict at all.

Speaker 2 (01:45:10):
Yeah, I agree, Like the just is one moment of
them alluding to it here, but it does raise that possibility. Yeah,
it feels like there's a war going on in heaven
and God is just absent, Like God is just hands
off and that that is, you know, concerning and perplexing
at the same time.

Speaker 3 (01:45:27):
Yeah. Anyway, Okay, so we're zooming toward the final showdown here.
So Gabriel leaves Thomas and heads off to eat the
child's soul. When he gets there, Catherine defends her. Catherine
shoots Gabriel, but he is still not deterred. He says,
in heaven we believe in love, and she says kind

(01:45:48):
of awkward line. She says, what do you love, Gabriel,
And then he goes cracking your skull and then he
grabs her and starts to do a Jason Vorhees head squeeze. Yeah,
but then Thomas races him with the truck, is attacked
by Amanda Plumber in the truck, and then ends up
crashing into the house where everybody is gathered somehow implausibly,

(01:46:08):
but fortunately, only Gabriel is wounded in this crash. Oh,
and Amanda Plumber seemingly dies, but with Gabriel wounded, Lucifer
shows up to finish the job. They kind of banter
back and forth about the war. Gabriel says, the war
is mine. Lucifer says, your war is arrogance. That makes
it evil, and that's mine. So another question here, like, wait,

(01:46:33):
I thought Lucifer was not involved in this second war,
that was my understanding. But why is Gabriel spitting at
him about victory?

Speaker 2 (01:46:40):
Yeah? Yeah, little uncertain here, but we're racing towards the
finish here and right that the film is convinced that
this solves things for us exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:46:50):
So the Exorcism of Mary goes on. In the background,
Lucifer starts eating Gabriel's heart, and at the moment this happens,
he like takes a big chomp out of the heart
and then Mary coughs up a skeleton made of CGI
fire that gets obliterated by a ray of light from
the clouds.

Speaker 2 (01:47:05):
Yeah, and this looks bad compared to the mostly great
practical effects in the film. This was apparently a Mirramax
producer suggests, if I remember correctly where they're like, you
should do some CGI here. Oh. I also want to
mention in the scene where Lucifer reappears, there's a moment
Morrison's character has some great like snarling and speaking weird
things to the side, and there's one moment where he

(01:47:28):
speaks to the indigenous characters and speaks to them in
their own language, and that was apparently Vigo's idea, like
the actual script had English language, and he's like, well,
he would be able to speak in any language, so
I should know what they would say, and I will
say that and they'll teach me to say it, and
that's how it rolled out.

Speaker 3 (01:47:47):
I think at one point he speaks to Gabriel. Gabriel
in Latin.

Speaker 2 (01:47:51):
Oh yeah, I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:47:52):
Just briefly, and then for our benefit, speaks in English.

Speaker 2 (01:47:55):
But yeah, Glatin of course the language of Evan apparently,
I think, just association with Catholicism maybe yeah, yeah, anyway,
they could have spoke like, you know anything, yeah, anything,
could have been some sort of caveman language or something. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:48:12):
So after this, Lucifer starts like he eats Gabriel's heart,
so you think the main dangerous past, but then he
also starts like turning on Thomas and Catherine, like come
to hell with me. He starts telling them to come
home to Hell, and Thomas taunts Lucifer saying I have
a soul and I have faith, You're nothing.

Speaker 2 (01:48:32):
No, thank you, No, I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:48:34):
Want to go to hell. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:48:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:48:37):
And then the last thing Lucifer says again a good
goods end offline. He says, leave the light on Thomas,
and then just disappears. He explode, Actually doesn't just disappear.
He explodes in a cloud of ravens.

Speaker 2 (01:48:48):
There you go.

Speaker 3 (01:48:49):
And then I'm sorry again, but a very funny transition
to suddenly happy ending music just kicks right in.

Speaker 2 (01:48:57):
Yeah, I know I agree with you on all of this.
At this point in the film, I wish things are
just ended, because from here on out it really feels
like someone either decided or was told, hey, let's keep
it a little light hearted here.

Speaker 3 (01:49:09):
First of all, we see all the characters are okay now,
and the good part of the ending like this, I
guess is that you would feel kind of bad if
you like saw Mary go through all that and then
you like don't get to see her being all right
at the end. So Mary the kid is okay, and
so that's good to see, like, okay, she's doing all right.
But we get this ending voiceover monologue from Thomas. I
wrote this down, he says in the end, I think

(01:49:30):
it must be about faith. And if faith is a choice,
then it can be lost for a man, an angel,
or the devil himself. And if faith means never completely
understanding God's plan, then maybe understanding just a part of it.
Our part is what it is to have a soul.
So there it's defined. I still don't understand, though, And

(01:49:51):
then he says, and maybe in the end, that's what
being human is. After all, the sentence says in the end,
and after all.

Speaker 2 (01:50:00):
Oh, man real strong, he learned too late that man
is a feeling creature.

Speaker 3 (01:50:05):
Vibes exactly what I thought. Yeah, but yeah, then we
get to go to the closing credits and hear skid Row.

Speaker 2 (01:50:14):
I think, yeah, this is another where I just I
don't know, I mean, no offensive folks who love skid Row,
and maybe skid Row is it's perfectly fun outside of
this specific context. But the closing credits are breaking down
by skid Row, and in my opinion, just absolutely sucks it.
Just it just at least here it just feels like, oh,

(01:50:34):
come on, of all the this is the mid nineties,
this is this is what you I don't know, you
know clearly the treasure Chest wasn't completely open to license
any song they wanted, but truly there was a better choice.
Just have some you know, creepy Gregorian chant and we'll
call it a day. Yeah, this is what we went with.

Speaker 3 (01:50:53):
What would have been the appropriate and I think what
I would have expected is like a a two song
ending credits where you have half of it's a rock
song and then half of it is atmospheric Gregory and
chant music. I don't know in what order that would be,
but one of them should be like a song by

(01:51:14):
Alison Chains, and then the other one is the Gregory
and chance.

Speaker 2 (01:51:18):
Yeah, Alison Chains would have been a good pick here. Obviously,
Harris the off of the Downward Spiral that would have
just come out in ninety four, so you know, if
everything was possible, that would have been a really strong conclusion,
almost too strong, like that would maybe be a be
hitting it too hard, but it would have been. It
would have been memorable, but also probably not striking the
tone they're clearly going for here.

Speaker 3 (01:51:39):
So I haven't seen the Prophecy sequels, but if I
saw this movie and they were like, do you want
to watch a sequel to the Prophecy, I would be
like well, Christopher Walkins dead, so not really like I'm
only interested if he's coming back, but apparently he's maybe
not as dead as it's made the seam.

Speaker 2 (01:52:00):
Yeah, he will be back in the Prophecy too, and
he's bringing Britney Murphy with him as his new thraw.
I believe he comes back from Hell, so I'm gonna
have to revisit that one as well in the future.
Not for next week, don't worry, but at some point
in the future we may come back to the Prophecy universe.

Speaker 3 (01:52:17):
Oh i'd be down. Yeah, I just want to reiterate
again that I don't know, I can I can see
why this movie got mixed reviews, and I can see
people going both ways on it. But however you feel
about the rest, I think that the Christopher Walken parts
of it are just a joy.

Speaker 2 (01:52:36):
Yeah, Walkin Walkn is terrific here. This is clearly he's
he's having a great time. He's really getting in there,
making all sorts of weird choices, but entertaining choices to
be sure, totally. So Yeah, love Christopher Walkins Gabriel and
that alone is worth revisiting. If memory serves, there's a
great segment in the third one where he's driving a

(01:52:58):
convertible whilst playing the trump.

Speaker 3 (01:53:00):
Oh yeah, yeah, i'd watch that.

Speaker 2 (01:53:03):
Yeah, glad I have these discs now, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a handsome three disc set or three movies set.
I can't remember how many disks. Maybe it's just two
discs and the first movies on one disc in the
two and three are on the next disc. Not that
you need to know all that, but there you go.
All right, we're gonna go ahead and close the book

(01:53:25):
on this one, the ancient biblical manuscript of this episode,
but we'll be back next week with more, just a
reminder once more, like we're discussing at the beginning. Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But by the
end of the week, you know, we're worn out. It's
time to turn the page and just focus on a

(01:53:46):
weird film. That's what we do here on Weird House
Cinema right in. If you have suggestions for films you'd
like to see us cover in the future. If you
want to look at past episodes, find them wherever you
get your podcasts. Just look for Stuff to Blow your
mind and you will find us go back through the
through the archives. Also, if you are on letterbox dot com,
look us up. Our username is weird House, and we

(01:54:08):
have a nice list of all the movies we've covered
over the years, and sometimes a peek ahead at what's
coming up next.

Speaker 3 (01:54:14):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:54:35):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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