Director/Screenplay – Joel Soisson, Story – John Sullivan, Producer – Ron Schmidt, Photography – Gabriel Kosuth, Music – Joseph LoDuca, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jamison Goei, Visual Effects – Neo Digital Imaging, Makeup Effects – Gary J. Tunnicliffe, Creature & Makeup Effects – Two Hours in the Dark, Inc, Production Design – Cristian Niculescu. Production Company – Dimension Films/Neo Art & Logic.
Cast
John Light (John Riegert), Sean Pertwee (Dani Simionescu), Kari Wuhrer (Allison), Doug Bradley (Laurel), Dan Astileanu (Hardy), Georgina Rylance (Clara), Jason London (Simon), Stephen Billington (Ion), Catalina Aleandru (Carmen Marcovei), Boris Petroff (Father Constantin)
Plot
In Bucharest, Romania, police detective Dani Simionescuis is joined by Interpol agent John Riegert. Their first case is a drug dealer that Dani had been shaking down for money whose body has been thrown from a church and his heart ripped out. There are a similar series of deaths around the city. Meanwhile, at a local church, the priest finds a unique version of the Bible that is still being written by an invisible force just before he is killed. The Bible is taken by the church receptionist Allison. She is pursued by a demonic entity that is capable of passing through different bodies and wants the Bible because the possessor has control over the end of the world. The more he spends time with John, the more Dani finds odd things about him. John then insists on taking Dani for a drive to show him into his own past and how it relates back to Romania’s brutal dictatorship of the 1980s.
Although it was not a huge success at the time it was released, the angel horror film The Prophecy (1995) ended up spawnig a popular franchise on video shelves. Christopher Walken returned for the first two sequels with The Prophecy II (1998) and The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000). The rights then passed over to series producer Joel Soisson who made The Prophecy: Uprising here and the subsequent The Prophecy: Forsaken (2005).
Joel Soisson and his Neo Art & Logic production company have made a speciality out of buying up expired film franchises and generating further sequels. Their efforts include four Hellraiser sequels, Highlander: Endgame (2000), Hollow Man II (2006), two Mimic sequels, the Dracula 2000 films, three Children of the Corn sequels and Piranha 3DD (2012), among others. Soisson was producer on the first two Prophecy film when his company was still called Neo Motion Pictures, becoming Neo Art & Logic by the time of the third. Soisson made his directorial debut here and went on to the sequel, as well as to direct Pulse 2: Afterlife (2008), Pulse 3 (2008), Children of the Corn: Genesis (2011) and Cam2Cam (2014).
Soisson shoots The Prophecy: Uprising in Romania, where he also travelled to make the Dracula 2000 sequels and at least two of the Hellraiser sequels. On the other hand, rather than trying to make Romania look like the USA, the film actually has it play itself. Moreover, the script manages to in interestingly wind in Romania’s past under the brutal dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu from 1974 until his execution in 1989. John Light is even seen digitally positioned behind Ceausescu in the archival film footage montage that opens the film.
(l to r) Sean Pertwee and John Light
A good half of The Prophecy: Uprising involves characters running around muttering meaningful cryptic phrases and issuing warnings without it being clear what is going on. John Light and Sean Pertwee team up on an investigation, although it is never clear what they are investigating or even what their assignment is. In a competing plot, becomes apparent that they are up against the demon Belial, which, in a trick taken from The Hidden (1987), is capable of possessing and inhabiting various bodies as it comes after the occult bible that Kari Wuhrer is fleeing with.
That said, the film finally comes together in its last act where it explains Sean Pertwee’s past and the importance of the Bible. Here there is also the twist revelation [PLOT SPOILERS] that the impossibly handsome John Light is not the angel we assume he is – or at least in angel in the good sense – and that he is in fact The Devil. This is presumably the same Satan we also saw played by a far more malevolent Viggo Mortensen in The Prophecy. This proves an effective twist. (Indeed, you also wonder if John Light, his actual birth name, was cast for these reasons ie. Lucifer being the Latin term meaning bringer of light). Certainly, Light makes quite a genteel, sympathetic and moral Lucifer, walking through the film with detached serenity. The script cannot help but leave you wondering what Belial was rebelling against in that Lucifer was supposedly, according to Biblical mythology, rebelling against Heaven’s dominion in the first place.
