Susan Granger’s review of ‘c” (Screen Gems)
Think of it as an eerie feature-length “X-Files”/”Twilight Zone” episode – this supernatural tale of a seven-foot tall, red-eyed, winged apparition who foretells doom and destruction. Here’s the background: in his 1975 cult-thriller, John A. Keel claimed he experienced various paranormal events in tiny Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966-67 while writing about UFOs for Playboy magazine so screenwriter Richard Hatem has adapted his story for the screen. Richard Gere plays John Klein, an intrepid Washington Post political reporter whose wife (Debra Messing) drew mysterious sketches of a moth-like monster she said she’d seen just before her death from a rare brain tumor. Two years later, when he’s driving to Richmond, Virginia, Klein somehow winds up in Point Pleasant, where his car breaks down in the middle of the night on a lonely country road. When he knocks on the door of a nearby house, he encounters a paranoid redneck (Will Patton) who aims a gun at him and accuses him of harassment. Soon a local cop (Laura Linney) appears on the scene and she tells Klein something strange is going on. Good, church-going people are experiencing creepy, inexplicable things, including demonic voices from beyond that warn of imminent disaster on the Ohio River, and a spooked scientist (Alan Bates) relates his experiences. None of this makes much sense but director Mark Pellington (“Arlington Road”) uses extreme close-ups to maintain the tension and suspense. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Mothman Prophecies” is an ominous 5. So what’s the truth behind the tale? Several credible witnesses claim to have seen this creature and the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River collapsed in 1967, apparently of metal fatigue. And according to Keel, the Mothman manifestations continue.
