The Correct Order To Watch The Prophecy Movies

In Gregory Widen's 1995 horror film "The Prophecy," angels look like ordinary people but are a little ... off. They are typically clad in black suits, but move like birds, snapping their heads around quickly, as if constantly aware of potential danger. They also have unnatural balance, able to perch on the edges of buildings or the backs of chairs without toppling over. When an angel calls Uziel (Jeff Cadiente) dies in the first "Prophecy," a medical examiner finds that the corpse is missing its eyes and that its blood chemistry is similar to that of an unborn fetus. Angels, it seems, are also intersex, possessing both a penis and a vagina. Angels, it seems, lurk among us, resentful of humanity.

The archangel Gabriel (Christopher Walken), still carrying his trumpet, is planning a war on humanity, hoping to foster the world's most evil soul, which was culled from the body of a dead dictator and stored inside a young girl. Even Lucifer (Viggo Mortensen) cannot abide by Gabriel's shenanigans and turns to the former priest and current LAPD detective Thomas Dagget (Elias Koteas) for help.

"The Prophecy" was a modest hit when it came out in 1995, gaining attention from horror fans for its unique version of Angels. It was widely rented enough to warrant several straight-to-video sequels, two of which Walken returned for. Horror icons like Doug Bradley and Tony Todd appeared in the sequels, as did Glenn Danzig.

Video store rats and DVD collectors have likely seen the many multi-disc DVD sets that Miramax/Dimension put out in the late 2000s, featuring a random smattering of the company's shlockier horror fare. One might find the five "Prophecy" movies packaged with "Dracula 2000," "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Meyers," and the fourth-through-eighth "Hellraiser" movies.

The "Prophecy" movies are best viewed in the order of their release.

Here is the correct order to watch the "Prophecy" movies (i.e. their release order):

• Gregory Widen's "The Prophecy" (1995)
• Greg Spence's "The Prophecy II" (1998)
• Patrick Lussier's "The Prophecy 3: The Ascent" (2000)
• Joel Soisson's "The Prophecy: Uprising" (2005)
• Joel Soisson's "The Prophecy: Forsaken" (2005)

At the end of "The Prophecy II," Gabriel fails in his attempts to overthrow humanity and is transformed into a human by Archangel Michael (Eric Roberts). Divine locations are re-envisioned as industrial wastelands, a common creative choice throughout the 1990s. The Garden of Eden, for instance, is now an industrial park. In "The Prophecy 3," Gabriel is humbled and at peace, understanding the pain he caused to humans as an Angel. By the end of that film, Gabriel shows compassion and becomes an Angel again, now ascending to Heaven to be with God. One might think that would be the end of the story, but in 2005, a pair of sequels starring Kari Wuhrer hit video stores.

The fourth and fifth movies were filmed at the same time in Romania. Many, many cheap horror movies are filmed in Romania, and attentive horror fans will likely be able to traverse the Romanian woods without a compass, thanks to the number of times we've seen them.

One might see "The Prophecy" movies as an outcropping of many '90s trends. At the end of the millennium, there was a sense that the world was ending and the magic was gone. Angels were now just angry people. We paved paradise and put up a parking lot. The first film was striking and stylish, but with each progressive sequel, the series became less and less interesting. That first film is an interesting time capsule of 1990s concerns, however, and a corker of a horror flick to boot.