Quentin Tarantino’s favourite “dumbass” horror movie: “A piece of shit from the word go”
Everyone has at least one movie they know is awful that they completely and utterly adore with every fibre of their being, but there arguably isn’t a more well-known or successful director who loves as many woeful crimes against cinema as Quentin Tarantino.
Obviously, filmmakers who craft commercially successful and awards-laden pictures for a living aren’t obligated to spend their free time watching inarguable masterpieces, and seeing as Tarantino was raised on exploitation and trash, it’s somewhat admirable that he’s never soured on those formative influences.
Curiously, the detestable horror flick that earned faint praise from the two-time Academy Award winner was also singled out by Stephen King as his favourite shitty scarefest, indicating that John Frankenheimer’s 1979 effort, Prophecy, might just be the epitome of the ‘so bad it’s good’ movie.
The director of The Manchurian Candidate and the screenwriter of The Omen, David Seltzer, was a promising combination on paper, at least. However, the ridiculous tale of mutant creatures running amok after being affected by a poisoned water supply makes the cardinal mistake of shoddy filmmaking by taking itself laughably seriously.
“John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy is pretty much a piece of shit from the word go,” Tarantino wrote in a retrospective review for his New Beverly Cinema. “But the more it goes, the more enjoyable this piece of shit gets, until it can officially be classified under that beloved category: enjoyable piece of shit.”
Tarantino fondly recalled attending a preview screening at The Mann’s Old Town Mall Theatre in Torrance, California, where he was struck by how the supposedly terrifying mutated bear that terrorises the cast had “a face like a cheeseless pizza” and didn’t exactly strike fear into the heart of the audience.
“It’s the bonkers bear monster that makes the movie memorable,” he explained. “All the horror movie elements, the characters, the dialogue, and the pulp plotting are awful. But what really makes the script so obnoxious is how serious and important Seltzer thinks his ridiculous movie monster is.”
Tarantino was under the impression that the scribe “feels he’s making a grand ecological statement,” but instead “made an unintentional comedy that the cast plays so seriously that it plays like a deadpan farce.” The Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction creator even branded Seltzer a “dumbass” and The Prophecy itself as a “stupid-ass movie,” which obviously means that he had a great time watching it.
Yes, he shits all over it, but he’s doing so from a place of love and admiration, even when calling it a “monstrosity of a movie about a monstrosity that only a mother could love.” Make no mistake: Frankenheimer helmed a film that has zero redeeming features. On the other side of the coin, that’s exactly why Tarantino and King have become two of its highest-profile supporters.
If anything, two world-renowned genre aficionados both celebrating The Prophecy as being so bad it’s wormed its way into their hearts and become a guilty pleasure, almost makes it worth tracking down, provided anyone feels compelled to spend over 100 minutes of their time on something they know is going to suck deeply.
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