The Prophecy - Forsaken (DVD)

This is the second Prophecy film to come out this year — and maybe it’s too much of a good thing. While I was pleasantly surprised by The Prophecy – Uprising, I found myself quite bored early on with Forsaken.

The same director and stars are back for round five, with one exception: the usually excellent Tony Todd appears here as a rote ambassador of evil who is after a magical tome called The Lexicon. The keeper of the good book is Allison (Kari Wuhrer), the young woman who was recruited for the trying task in Prophecy – Uprising.

As The Lexicon continues to write itself and reveal eternal mysteries of the universe, it becomes clear that it will predict the exact time when the Antichrist will arrive on earth. With control of the Lexicon and its enormous power at stake, a group of fallen angels will stop at nothing to get the book from Allison.

The movie starts right off at a run and never slows down long enough for us to learn anything or come to care about anyone — Allison is just bait on legs as she runs around in a white fetish wig and drenched with cheap perfume (there is a method to her madness, but it doesn’t pan out). Wuhrer is passable in the role, but Todd and Jason Scott Lee definitely look as though they’d rather be elsewhere.

The Prophecy – Forsaken is much more an action picture than its predecessors and as such, the element of supernatural suspense the franchise has going for it is all but lost. (But you have to admire the chutzpah of the marketing department for putting a faceless, black-haired little girl on the front cover the DVD.)

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson