BATS, BATS, BATS & JAWS WITH CLAWS: NIGHTWING, PROPHECY, GRIZZLY
Distinguished character actor David Warner (1941-2022) almost redeems large portions of the 1979 killer vampire bat picture Nightwing, and he’s the reason that it rates out around two stars rather than one or possibly even worse.

Pardon the pun, but Warner truly bites into his dialogue and his monologues are the best moments in Nightwing. Phillip Payne comes across a little batty himself, more often delightfully so than not, and that batty quality would seem to come naturally with the territory of studying and killing plague-infested vampire bats.

The film’s best moments are definitely not the special effects and the vampire bat attack scenes, which almost had me laughing as much as The Bat People or Prophecy or perhaps the ultimate cinematic disaster disaster movie The Swarm.

Generally, I love the prerequisite genre scenes where the scientist explains the phenomenon on the rampage within the movie to a slack-jawed authority figure who usually downplays whatever threat it might be and decides to keep the park / town open.

It rarely ever lets me down, and I enjoyed Nightwing every time Phillip Payne goes all Dr. Sam Loomis on us about vampire bats.

Youngman Duran: It just doesn’t seem natural for a man to spend his life, his entire life, killing bats.

Phillip Payne: Not just bats. Vampire bats. I kill them because they’re evil. There’s a mutual grace and violence in all forms of nature; and each specie of live gives something in return for its own existence. All but one. The freak. The vampire bat alone is that specie. Have you ever seen one of their caves?

YD: No.

PP: I killed over 60,000 of them last year in Mexico. You really understand the presence of evil when you go into their caves. The smell of ammonia alone is enough to kill you. The floor of the cave is a foul syrup of digested blood. And the bats: up high, hanging upside down, rustling, fighting, mating, sending constant messages, waiting for the light to fade, hungry for blood, coaxing the big females to wake up and flex their nightwings to lead the colony out across the land, homing in on any living thing; cattle, sheep, dogs, children, anything with warm blood. And they feast, drinking the blood and pissing ammonia. I kill them because they’re the quintessence of evil. To me, nothing else exists. The destruction of vampire bats is what I live for.

Alrighty then.

Almost none of the small pleasures from Nightwing are to be found in Prophecy, films released only a week apart during June 1979.

Prophecy alternates between a serious, more ambitious movie about ecological concerns and land rights in a dispute between Native Americans and the polluting paper mill, domestic scenes involving a husband (Robert Foxworth) and his wife (Talia Shire), and silly monster attack scenes that belong in something like Food of the Gods or Bigfoot, two bad monster movies from earlier in the ’70s.

Rather, I meant laughably bad monster attack scenes.

None of the elements gel well together in Prophecy.

Prophecy gets awful preachy at times, maybe not too much of a surprise given the film’s title, and Foxworth’s Dr. Robert Verne makes for a rather lackluster and thus unlikable protagonist. Foxworth does not give Prophecy a jolt like Warner does in Nightwing, and his scientific explanatory scenes are pedestrian.

Dr. Verne and his wife Maggie do not have the relationship that, let’s see here, pugilist protagonist Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) and Adrian (Shire) do in Rocky and Rocky II, ironic considering that Rocky II and Prophecy were both released June 15, 1979.

Their domestic scenes are a drag, and I think less of Foxworth’s Dr. Verne from early on because of the way he treats his wife.

Veteran character actor Richard Dysart (1929-2015) gives the best performance in Prophecy, and it’s not even close. Dysart plays the role of the detestable paper mill company man Isely so effectively that it’s one of the film’s greatest disappointments when it cuts away from his graphic dismemberment by mercury mutant bear Katahdin late in the picture. We’ll have to settle instead for Dysart’s grisly death scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing.

The Katahdin we actually get in the finished product and the one in the promotional material (and dialogue) are not exactly one and the same, which hearkens Prophecy back to low-budget precursors like The Giant Claw and The Wasp Woman more than contemporaries like Alien and Dawn of the Dead, but without the fun of any of those movies.

Leonard Maltin described the monster as a giant salami, Isely said that it’s larger than a dragon with the eyes of a cat, Time reportedly said that it’s Smokey the Bear with an advanced acne condition, and Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert called it a cross between an earthworm and a bear (Siskel) and a grizzly bear and Godzilla (Ebert).

Given that it’s Kevin Peter Hall as the man in the monster suit, one might be tempted to call it a cross between Predator and Harry and the Hendersons.

Manbearpig!

Grizzly, a killer bear picture released three years before Prophecy, works a lot better than Prophecy because it succeeds at a much more modest level of ambition.

It’s required by law that every review mention Grizzly is a Jaws rip-off or we can go right on ahead and call it Jaws with Claws.

We have a law enforcement officer (park ranger), a military veteran (helicopter pilot), and a scientist (naturalist) on the hunt for a giant killer animal (grizzly bear). We also have a park supervisor who refuses to close down the national park despite a series of brutal deaths. The park supervisor allows hunters into the forest to hunt and kill the bear, while media converge on the scene for sensational coverage, but eventually our three main characters must try and do the deed themselves.

I honestly don’t mind too much that Grizzly follows the Jaws formula because Christopher George, Richard Jaeckel, and Andrew Prine are good in their roles and I care about them in their battle against a primal beast.

Honestly, it’s as simple as that, whereas I didn’t particularly care about the overwhelming majority of the human characters in Prophecy and did not care one way or another whether they lived or died just as long as the end credits rolled.

Grizzly, thankfully, is also not preachy, it’s endearing and entertaining on a basic level, and it’s a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes.

Granted, the three main actors and characters are not anywhere near the same level as Roy Scheider’s Sheriff Brody, Richard Dreyfuss’ Matt Hooper, and Robert Shaw’s Captain Quint, just like William Girdler’s no Steven Spielberg, but I still think Grizzly has earned a place right alongside such ’70s killer animal staples as Night of the Lepus, Frogs, Squirm, Kingdom of the Spiders, and Piranha.

Nightwing (1979) **; Prophecy (1979) *; Grizzly (1976) ***