The Seventh Sign (1988)
(In French, On Cable TV, May 2019) Somehow, I expected something both worse and better from the 1980s apocalyptic horror movie The Seventh Sign. The first two sequences set the tone, with a quasi-hilarious storm of clichés meant to foreshadow a biblical apocalypse of global proportions, executed in a gloriously overdone fashion. I was ready and primed to enjoy the campiness … and then the film goes dull. Really dull. Still ponderous, still overdone but not enjoyably so. Round-faced Demi Moore is cute enough as a pregnant woman only gradually noticing the portentous signs surrounding the upcoming birth of her child, but Michael Biehn is dull—only Jurgen Prochnow seems to understand the kind of film he’s in, playing every scene with unabashed menace. To be fair, some of the dumb fun comes back at the end, with a climactic sequence of such melodramatic magnitude that we’re finally back in camp territory. Alas, this lasts all of five minutes, leading to a pat ending that doesn’t quite manage to cap it off successfully. It doesn’t help that the film’s middle section is humdrum 1980s stuff, familiar without being comfortable. The Seventh Sign is by no means a good movie and never could have become one, but it’s not unreasonable to think that with a slightly different touch, it could have become an enjoyable one.