THE OMEN
Satan said, "I will call him Mini-Me!"
I'm a little less impressed today by this coming-of-the-Antichrist movie than I was when I first saw it in high school. I dunno, I guess it's just getting harder for me to take "the devil among us" movies seriously these days. (strange trivia - before I originally saw this movie, I'd read both the novelization and the spoof in Mad magazine) (or was it Cracked? And which was the one with the sadistic, whip-wielding slave-driving clown for a mascot?) But I still enjoy The Omen very much, because despite how hard it tries to be stuffy and serious, it still comes across as kind of goofy and a lot of fun.
Gregory Peck, wearing his best "I can't believe I'm in this movie" grimace, plays Robert Thorne, a middle-aged American politician/lawyer-type person whose wife (Lee Remick) gives birth, alas, to a dead child. But she doesn't know this, and the priest informs him that just down the hall in the hospital, a live baby has just been born and the mother unfortunately died. So they do the ol' switcheroo, never letting the wife in on it. (this would be a lot harder to pull off if the kid were Chinese) Soon afterward, he's given the post of Ambassador to Great Britain, and ships off with his family to London.
The kid attracts a strange throng of protectors - a creepy governess (Billie Whitelaw), a stray Rottweiller - but those who fear and oppose him don't have to worry about THEM, they have to worry about things like flagpoles from the sky and being decapitated by flying sheets of glass. But why would anybody have anything against poor innocent little Damien Thorne? It can't be that his last governess hung herself at his birthday party, or that he starts having a shitfit every time he gets near a church...well, if you met his birth mother (as bitchy as they come), you wouldn't even ask; and his natural father has Deicide for a lounge band. (Hint to parents: if you give your kid a scary name like Damien Thorne...just don't give your kid a name like Damien Thorne, okay?)
Like I said, I loved this as a teen, but today, while I still have a considerable amount of affection for it, I'm more sensitive to how silly it all is. There's one scene where a poem from Revelation is interpreted, and it's a real hoot - "when the Holy Roman Empire rises" indeed! (we hear this poem about fifty times in this movie, and it rhymes in English despite that it's translated, presumably, from Hebrew) David Warner steals the show here, not only with his magnificent exit but with the fact that unlike the clearly dissatisfied Peck, he's obviously happy to be here. Warner's always good, even when he's bad, and here he's just good, playing a photographer whose pictures foretell these weird accidents and suicides with what appear to be flaws in the film. What is it you think he'll see when he takes a picture of himself?
The freak-accident deaths are the highlights of this film, and some of 'em are doozies. My personal favorite - and it'll be yours, too - is that sheet-glass decapitation, which is captured in slow-motion from four different camera angles with De Palma-like sadistic glee. However, Lee Remick's early effective exit from the film is far more lame - not only is it one of the most lame-looking falls I've ever seen, but she only falls about six feet, right into a body cast, in which she spends the rest of the movie.
The plot is loaded with all sorts of goofy stuff, a lot of which makes no sense. Who says "the eternal sea" is the world of politics? I've never heard to politics referred to as such. And what's with the priest, who seems (with the 666 birthmark and everything) to have been Satan's first choice? Did the prophecy hold water fifty years before when HE was born? How does a six-foot fall cripple a healthy adult woman? Why would the movie repeatedly refuse to mention what year it takes place, but clearly dates itself by showing little Damien in these tiny little bellbottoms at every opportunity? Yeah, the plot's nonsense, but so it is in all these Devil movies. The difference is, I enjoy this nonsense more than most nonsense.
Once I'd gasp when it's revealed that Damien was born on June 6th, around 6 AM; today, I smile and chuckle to myself quietly, still enjoying myself thoroughly. The script by David Seltzer even manages to find room for an attack by a pack of crazed baboons, despite the fact that it's set in London. The Omen is almost two hours long, but it's loaded with action and fun clues about the kid (clues for the cast, certainly not for the audience who can figure everything out from the poster) and splendid death scenes, so it goes by quickly, thanks to Richard Donner's direction. Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score is one of the best he's ever done, the only part of this movie I take dead seriously. (I've heard that his score for The Final Conflict is actually the best of the trilogy - but I haven't seen it in so long, I cannot comment for myself)
The Omen gave rise to three sequels: the first was more of the same (and enjoyable because of it), the second was too serious to be much fun and too silly to take seriously, and the third was made for TV, forgetting things that happened in the original trilogy, like, oh, the Second Coming, for example. As if nobody noticed. Hey, maybe nobody would. Seltzer's novelization of the first movie gave rise to of course novelizations of the next two, and then sequels of their own - at least two, probably more, one of them saddled with a goofy title like Armageddon 2000, or something like that. Never read 'em.
Recommended? Oh, yeah. If The Exorcist was a steak dinner with a baked potato and vegetables and Rosemary's Baby an Olympic-sized swimming pool full of rice cakes (completely without flavoring of any kind), then The Omen is at least a Sunday-afternoon barbecue. It's certainly better than is suggested by the back of the box, which gushes "Superior in all technical aspects".