User Reviews

Just when you thought this film series couldn't make LESS sense, here comes "The Prodigal Planet" to show us how very wrong we are.

The great awfulness starts in the beginning, where preacher man from the last movie has SOMEHOW gone back in time and is now not on the guillotine where he ended movie #3 but is walking down a passageway to the guillotine. A blonde woman saves him as she's dressed up in a fake military outfit with a fake mark. So....they bust out of the base (preacher man doesn't really find it odd that she was able to smuggle herself onto a military base presided over by a GLOBAL force but....anywho). No mention is ever really made of the preacher man's dead friends from the last film...he kinda just forgets them and moves on to our next bunch of misfits.

Other than blonde woman, preacher man starts a road trip with some women and her bratty teenage daughter who they run into in a nuclear disaster zone brimming with zombie mutants. Apparently our main characters are immune to radiation as they just walk around in the contaminated air. One of the zombies ISN'T evil and he's a teenage boy so he hooks up with the girl. By 'hooks up' I mean they hold hands or something, this being a Christian movie, so we never figure out if his parts still work.

Lots of driving and stuff happens as they're going to some caves where all the Christians live now waiting for Jesus. Oh, evil hippie man whose wife got killed by a giant bee last movie is hunting them too. It's kind of like "Wild at Heart" without the sex. La dee da....zombie boy takes a bullet for the girl or something (I'm still pretty sure she doesn't even give him a kiss as thanks or anything), it turns out blondie actually DOES have the mark and she was just pretending to be a Chrisitan pretending to have the mark (?). Not that we have to worry about her for very long cause Jesus takes her out with a train collision. Anyway, preacher man and the mom and her daughter get to the Christ caves and evil hippie dies during an earthquake.

Amen

Remember our friend David? Well, he didn't die at the end of Image of the Beast. No, he's back and ready to battle the forces of UNITE one more time. He's rescued by Connie, an Antichrist agent pretending to be a double agent for the Believers' Underground, who hopes that David can lead them to the hidden base of the Believers. Meanwhile, Armageddon and the Second Coming are on the way and everyone's going to die and pay for their sins.

This might be my favorite of the four films in this series, as now we've entered pure post-apoc territory, with leukemia and facial lesion-having mutants called the Doomsday People wandering the wasteland wearing monks robes, David playing matador with helicopters and a character who does a child's voice that is not unlike Christian icon Lil' Markie (trust me, it's best if I don't link you to him, let him be the nightmare that only I live).

We also learn that Mark gave up on God after his brother tried to race a train and his car got hit by it. So there's that.

This movie is packed with sermons, songs that bleed over the dialogue and long explanations of Biblical prophecy. In short, everything you've come to expect and more from this series. It also has David watch some ICBMs decimate the forces of UNITE and say, "It's hard to believe God could use something that hideous for good, but he's done it before."

Turner also shows back up and he's brought his maps of the End Times that we've all come to know, love and paint on to our own walls. I have no idea how we're going to sell this house now that I've made the guest room into a mural with the different signs of Armageddon, but that's our real estate agent's problem.

Connie has to be the best character in this film, as she suddenly breaks into a mall and loots it for clothes a full year before Night of the Comet and then busts out some insane disco dancing moves for no reason at all. Also, everyone continually mentions how gorgeous she is in this movie. I don't want to be rude, but she's the most attractive woman I've ever seen in an Armageddon Christian movie and that's no compliment.

In Marilyn Manson's book The Long Road Out of Hell, he says "I was thoroughly terrified by the idea of the end of the world and the Antichrist. So I became obsessed with it, watching movies like A Thief in the Night, which described very graphically people getting their heads cut off because they hadn't received 666 tattoos on their forehead." Therefore, this movie had the exact opposite effect that everyone wanted it to have, at least for one very special boy.

Finally, Jerry, who has been the porn mustached bad guy of all of these films, sits crying on the floor as nukes go off all around him. B-roll footage plays and the world finally, mercifully, ends.

SPOILERS!!! Here comes David, hero from Image of the Beast, and ready to go all the way to destroy the UNITE government! He even upgrades from calculators to computers in this one! So, yeah, what we have here basically is the quest for David, a religious snob/guerilla crusader, to get to some cave where the new Christians will be safe from the second coming of Christ. Along the way, he picks up some women--but he doesn't hit on them, no way, he's asexual or something--and tells a girl she could drop dead in front of him by having a brain clot--and dodges bullets by dancing in front of two helicopters. Oh, and they have to get from Nebraska to New Mexico (after David cracks a code in three seconds) and on the way they go through Omaha. Now, supposedly Omaha was nuked two days before, but now it's totally safe to walk around and all the residual radiation has subsided. The trees are all green. Grass grows happily between cracks in the sidewalks. Buildings and streets are completely intact--even the glass in storefront windows isn't broken. The only signs that a nuke may have hit two days before are some skeletons in the street. I love it! And what's better? Jerry is back! Diane is gone, sadly, but Jerry is around and doing well--this time with a normal moustache--and some radiation boils, to boot. I dunno, this one is a bit long, coming in over the two-hour mark. And there's some cool stuff like water turning to blood, and the sun getting super hot. But I think this one was the final in the series for a reason--the cool characters from the first two, and the first ten minutes of the third, are totally missing... Still, rumors persist that a fifth film is in the works! What they'd do after having ceased the series for twenty years, and after the popularization of the Left Behind series, would be very interesting to see. I personally hope that I will live to see the day we get another one. This is a unique and bizarre series that deserves a bit more attention--too bad MST3K never picked it up...