Director – Tibor Takacs, Screenplay – David Bourla & Brian Irving, Producers – Paul Colichman, Mark R. Harris & Stephen P. Jarchow, Photography – Barry Gravelle, Music – Guy Zerafa, Visual Effects Supervisor – Chris Bond, Makeup Effects – Cindy Smith, Production Design – . Production Company – Regent Entertainment/John Aaron Productions, Inc..
Cast
Rob Estes (Detective Michael Nostrand), Joely Fisher (Agent Lucy Gamille Hudson), Dave Brown (Detective Joe Pilton), Brent Fidler (Disciple Madoc), Fintan McKeown (Garamond), David Milbern (Agent Wilcox), Michael C. Gwynne (Astrologer La Font), Michael Zelnicker (John Doe), David Adamson (Agent Curtis), Eugene Davis (Bill McNulty), Joyce Krenz (Mrs Cohen)
Plot
Minneapolis police detective Michael Nostrand is investigating a seemingly unconnected series of homicides where victims have been incinerated as though by spontaneous combustion. At the various crime scenes, Michael keeps seeing a red-haired man wearing red sneakers. Michael’s friend Lucy Hudson is an FBI agent with psychic powers. She confides in him, saying she has a sense that Michael is significant. As they follow the trail, she believes this is part of a conspiracy created by Garamond, a man who has travelled back to France in the year 1536 and is using astral conjunctions and a time machine in an effort to bring about the Biblical Apocalypse. In the midst of this, Michel encounters people who keep insisting that he is the legendary prophet Nostradamus.
Nostradamus, or to go by his given name Michel de Nostradame (1503-66), was a French physician. Nostradamus is best known for his prophecies, which he wrote in a series of cryptic quatrains. Over the centuries these have been interpreted as predicting everything from the Great Fire of London to Adolf Hitler and the 9/11 attacks. There have been a vast number of interpretations, which consist of retrofitting some phrasing of his to refer to events after the fact. In more recent years, French scholars have offered detailed examination of Nostradamus’s original manuscripts alongside the English translations of these, concluding that most of the modern interpretations come from shabby or even wilfully inaccurate translations of the original.
Nostradamus has had a certain fascination on film from biopics like the silent Italian film Nostradamus (1925) and Nostradamus (1994) starring Tcheky Karyo to the Orson Welles-narrated documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981). Genre material has offered more fanciful accounts such as The Man Without a Body (1957) featuring the retrieval of the head of Nostradamus and the Mexican film series beginning with The Curse of Nostradamus (1961), featuring a vampire who was a descendant of Nostradamus.
This Nostradamus comes with a batshit crazy plot. Something to do with time-travelling Satanists trying to trigger the Biblical Apocalypse and sending non-human assassins (possibly angels) into the present to start things off by killing assorted individuals before The Millennium. We get Nostradamus, who happens to be a present-day police detective played by Rob Estes. He is aided by a Clairvoyant FBI agent. Thrown into the mix are the last hidden work of Leonardo Da Vinci and lost books of the Bible. In one of the plot convolutions, Estes manages to have his existence in the timeline erased by the act of time-travelling and then has to convince all his friends and colleagues of who he is.
Rob Estes as Detective Michael Nostrand, the man who becomes Nostradamus, and clairvoyant FBI agent Joely Fisher
Despite all of this, Nostradamus is not that interesting a film. Much of it plays out instead as being about a cop tracking a super-villainous assassin travelled through time, which suggests a supernatural version of The Terminator (1984). It feels more akin to supernatural action films such as Chuck Norris’s HellBound (1993) or even more so the Dolph Lundgren-starring The Minion (1998), which concerned efforts to stop the Biblical Apocalypse on the eve of the Millennium.
There are several points that are patently ludicrous – like where the assassinations are justified in terms of some kind of reverse astrology “If you remove certain people, you affect the position of the planets and the stars.” Or how Rob Estes time travels back to 1536 and somehow steps into the life of Nostradamus where his eidetic memory and future knowledge is used to explain Nostradamus’s prophecies, while conveniently ignoring the fact that the real Nostradamus had a reasonably well documented university life and medical career in the years before 1536.
Despite the title, Nostradamus is not even mentioned until the 35 minute point. In fact, what we have is another film about the Biblical Apocalypse at the Millennium a la The Minion and End of Days (1999) – but one that was apparently not released until after the millennium occurred. One can only speculate about the reasons for that – but maybe that people might have considered Nostradamus such a loopy film should rank high on the list of possibilities.
Director Tibor Takacs has made a number of other genre films including the very obscure Metal Messiah (1978) about a futuristic rock star; The Gate (1987) and its even better sequel Gate II (1990) about children unlocking a demonic gateway; the excellent I, Madman/Hardcover (1989) about a killer the emerges from a book; Redline/Deathline (1997) set in a near-future Russia; the Christmas films Once Upon a Christmas (2000) and Twice Upon a Christmas (2001) about Santa’s daughter; Rats (2003) about an asylum of intelligent rats; the monster movies Mansquito (2005), Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (2006), Ice Spiders (2007), Mega Snake (2007) and Spiders (2013); The Black Hole (2006), a monster movie about the titular stellar mass loose in St Louis; and the disaster films Meteor Storms (2010) and Destruction Los Angeles (2017); and the action film Black Warrant (2022).
