Horrorfest 2010: The Omen

I tried to watch THE OMEN once before, at the behest of some friends who claimed it was great but then wouldn't stop talking while the movie was actually playing. So, I gave up trying to pay attention halfway through. They did the same thing to me while I was trying to watch DONNIE DARKO, an aborted attempt that has led to a decade of people saying the following sentence to me: "YOU haven't SEEN DONNIE DARKO?!?!?!"

Anyway, now I've seen the whole thing. THE OMEN I mean. Not the other one. And. . . it's okay.

Here's the problem with THE OMEN, and it's not entirely the movie's fault: it has been so thoroughly imitated over the years by so many terrible movies that it's difficult to watch it the way the original audience must have. It's tough to be the movie that gave birth to an entire often-times shitty subgenre.

Granted, ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST -- both superior films -- came first. But maybe it says something about the genre that future filmmakers chose to emulate THE OMEN most closely.

THE OMEN is one of those "creepy kid" movies, where a 5-year-old stares sullenly at the camera and that's supposed to freak you out. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. It works about half the time here. In this case, the creepy kid is the aptly named Damien (Harvey Stephens) who barely has one line of dialogue in the entire film. He's the son of the American ambassador to Great Britain, Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck). Or, actually, the secretly adopted son -- minutes after his actual son apparently died just after birth, Thorn was pushed into secretly adopting Damien by a priest and a few nuns, and raised the kid without ever telling his wife (Lee Remick) what happened.

It's not long before weird stuff starts happening around Damien. His first nanny publicly hangs herself at his birthday party, creepy hellhounds start showing up, every other animal gets freaked out by his presence, he freaks out if he gets near a church, and an ominous replacement nanny (Billie Whitelaw) shows up without being asked. Even Damien's mom can barely stand him, and he doesn't even do anything that annoying early on, other than misuse a billiard table.

Eventually, a priest (Patrick Troughton) shows up to try to warn Thorn that he's raising the son of Satan -- the anti-Christ, but he gets so excited and crazy about his own warnings that he just ends up creeping Thorn out. Before he can really get his message across, the priest is killed in a bizarre "accident" when a bolt of lightning knocks the spire off the top of a church and it impales him. Neat.

As always happens in movies like this, eventually the strange goings on pick up such a fever pace that even Thorn has to come around and consider the idea that his son may actually be evil. He's helped in his quest to figure out what to do about all this by my favorite character, a photo journalist played by the great David Warner. He's the only one who seems to have any intellectual curiosity about what might be going on with Damien.

On its own merit, out of context, is it any good? Well, it's a little boring and about 20 minutes too long, but other than that, if you try to pretend you're watching it in a pop culture vacuum, you can see why it was originally so effective. First, all the performances are good, from a legend like Gregory Peck all the way down to the devil kid. Secondly, the technical credits are impeccable under the direction of Richard Donner. And, there's a killer score by Jerry Goldsmith. Again, this score has been so plundered by other movies that you kind of have to try to imagine what it was like to hear it for the first time, but it really spices up the action and does a lot of heavy lifting to help the somewhat slow and bloated flick move along a little better.

One thing I don't get about this movie is how little screen time Damien actually gets. There's never a scene were Thorn sits down to actually talk to his son about what's going on. Plot wise it probably wouldn't get him very far, but Damien could have been a 1 year old for as much autonomy as the movie gives him. He rarely talks and rarely does anything on his own unless someone else is pushing or pulling him along. I'm no expert when it comes to kids, but it seems like at 5 years old Damien should have at least some kind of personality and not just act as a sinister prop for the grown ups to react to. Rosemary's baby had more personality and it was a fetus.

Another nit pick that always bugs me about movies like this, and real life, I guess, to an extent. Just like some of the preachers at the mega-churches I catch on TV sometimes, the characters in movies like this are always interpreting fantastic Biblical prophecies in the terms of modern every day life. They routinely take complex, sometimes even crazy descriptions from the Bible and write them off as references to boring stuff like politics, the economy, whatever. I don't understand why. These same people have already made the leap of faith to believe in all this seemingly impossible stuff, but then try to reign it all in by explaining all of it away? Is this so guys like me will buy it more? Or, despite their faith, do they still have no imagination? I mean, why can't a seven headed dragon just BE a seven headed dragon, for once? How come it has to be the EU or whatever? I mean, this is God we're talking about. GOD. The almighty, all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipotent, omniscient, beginning, end, all that stuff.

As the wise role model Captain Kirk once said, "What does God need with a starship?"