The Omen and The Omen 666

(1976) ****1/2 (2006) ***1/2

So for the past week and a half or so I've been blocking on how to start this review, since Julie and Fitty-Pee McGee have already hit on the main points and I haven't been sure how to react to how un-scary the original Omen seemed this time around. So I'll start with a story.

JPX's and JSP's old house in Barrington (where their parents still live) is conveniently close to Barrington Beach, and JPX and I would walk over there a lot. On the street near the water there was a monastery. It was an unassuming, basic-looking brick institutional building, in a thickly-treed residential neighborhood. I never saw a monk from this place, but everyone knew it was a monastery. So one day JPX and I were walking back from the beach and we noticed the side gate was open, so being teenagers we decided to look in the monks' back yard. It was much like the front: well-mowed, lots of nicely groomed bushes, so we just moseyed across it to the chain-link fence on the other side, planning to exit and continue home. As we approached the other gate, which was closed, our blood was suddenly chilled by the sound of at least two barking dogs, coming around from the back yard towards us. JPX freaked and started climbing the fence, while I had the presence of mind to take a look at the latch, see that it wasn't locked, neatly slide and turn it so it opened, and step through the open gate. JPX was only about two feet up at this point, so he jumped down and went through, and we re-latched the gate and left.

"But what about the dogs?" you ask. Did we shut the gate in the nick of time on their snarling, foaming maws? Well, no. For all my presence of mind, I will admit the barking chilled me -- but the chill dissipated when the two dogs rounded the corner and revealed themselves to be a pack consisting of a beagle and a cocker spaniel. So while I worked the gate and JPX stopped his frantic climb, the little guys yapped enthusiastically around our ankles and were too shy to try and follow us through the gate.

Once we recovered we laughed our asses off, both at those tiny dogs but mostly at how much we'd FREAKED out at the idea of any canine/Bible-oriented forces coming after us. And of course it wasn't because of the fearsome rep of the poor Barrington monks who anonymously loosed their hounds on us, it was because of The Omen.

So I'm only demoting The Omen a half-star from perfect for not delivering the same punch that it used to. This time I'm opting to respect the elders. I mean... back in the day I read all the novelizations of these movies. That still counts for something.

When we were just learning about The Amityville Horror and The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby and The Omen, those films' common formula was perfectly matched for our age. That formula: everything is played as it is in the real world, except somewhere lurking out of sight is... THE DEVIL. Satanic conspiracies are fun when you're younger, before you grow up and realize the big conspiracies take place right in front of your face. Maybe it was the Church Lady who ruined it, with her constant repetition of what I just wrote down as "the formula," played for laughs. Could it be... SATAN?

Johnny Sweatpants once wrote "If you haven't seen the original Omen then you're either a) Amish, b) under six years of age or c) weird and smelly." So you smelly people are invited to stop reading, if you don't want things spoiled.

Much like inviting a vampire into your home, Gregory Peck invites evil incarnate into his life when he accepts the offer of a free newborn orphan to replace his own stillborn baby. The orphan's the Antichrist born of a female jackal, but I guess you get what you pay for. Cut to Damien's fifth birthday party and the film's most memorable scene, when a mean black dog gives Damien's nanny the stink-eye for a moment, and she then hangs herself in front of the whole gathering. While I kid The Omen, I have to say this scene lost none of its punch, and I even thought of it in a new way this time. When she says "It's all for you, Damien!" before stepping off the roof, I wondered what it is she knows, exactly. Most of the movie is spent figuring out what's going on, but she just has some big info dropped right into her brain. Curious.

I hate to say it, but a large part of my disappointment with The Omen this time around was the realism that is so much of its identity. It came across as drab to me, and against this backdrop the plot seemed to emerge too slowly. Father Brennan's contribution was particularly annoying. "Hi, I have a very important message that could effect the fate of the entire world, but first -- some useless religious jibberty jabber so you throw me out of your office."

So I was a bit tired of how The Omen presented itself, and when we screened the remake the following night, the ramped-up opulence of the visuals was a welcome change. I'd gotten a bit impatient with The Omen's slow, short list of Satanically-orchestrated death scenes spooling out, so the added one at the beginning of 666 was a welcome change, too. I liked the actor playing Damien a little more; they went with an actually spooky kid instead of an ironically normal-looking kid. I'm not a person who likes to automatically spurn new trends, so I was ready and willing to give this remake a fair shot, and not hit it with an automatic "why bother?"

Unfortunately, by the end, that is exactly the impression the movie left me. In Julie's review she says "Here's all you need to know: Liev Schrieber is not Gregory Peck, and Julia Stiles is too young." Schreiber delivers an adequate but not impressive performance, and whether you like Julia Stiles or not (I do), she's too young to believe as a mom. And the original movie rose again in my estimation, because I could see how the combination of unstylized scenery, Lee Remick's vulnerability and Gregory Peck's gravitas bestowed the movie with force. The Omen 666 has some amazing visuals, but despite my love for amazing visuals I have to report it does not deliver the goods.

And now to compensate for cramming two movies into one review, through the magic of screenshots I'll present some of my favorite comedic moments from The Omen.

First there's the reaction shot from the kids right after the nanny hangs herself. Note the two boys flanking the girl in front...

who share this amusing glance right afterwards. You can almost hear them whisper "dude... coolest party ever."

Next there's poor Father Brennan, struggling to reach sanctuary from the Satanic storm that suddenly whipped up around him. He hauls his cancer-ridden, morphine-addled carcass over the locked gate...

and boom! He just misses getting whacked by devil lightning...

that ironically blasts down the gate. My God, the evil!

And now for the remake, a little game of Find the Red, Find the Skulls!

Here's the opening of the shot that tracks down to the first view of Damien's birthday party. See the red balloon?

If you didn't, here's another one...

And if you missed them both, here's a big honkin' bundle of them.

Here's Jennings's dark room. Can you see the red in this picture? It's tricky...

Julie spotted this one; the entrance to the cemetary looks like a big skull.

What's that weird sticker on the hospital wall? Why is there a skull there? Oh no! The flowers! They're red! Something's gonna happen!

Red, skull, red, skull, redskull redskull -- ahhhhh!

I said before that I don't lean towards curmudgeonly about all the remakes these days; I think any movie can exist on its own merits. And I also don't have a problem with heavily stylized visuals, ones that make many critics whine dismissively "mehhh, it looks like a perfume commercial" or "mehhhhh, it looks like a music video." I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with that. If anything, we should be glad commercials these days can look cinematic.

But seriously John Moore, director of The Omen 666 -- this stuff you're pulling here is just asking for it. I mean, you freakin' boosted color symbolism from The Sixth Sense and splattered it all over the place. Ease up.

In conclusion, some plot holes presented as bullet points, the last refuge when you don't know what to write. Some of these have been covered by my colleagues.

- Really, why not just tell Robert Thorn that Damien is his kid and be done with it? So much trouble avoided.

- Why bash in the Thorn baby's skull instead of, say, a lethal injection? Liev Schreiber actually asks to see his son's body and they talk him out of it, but what if they couldn't? "What-a, this? It's-a nothing!"

- Satan goes through the trouble of destroying the hospital in a huge fire and meanwhile his minions bury the jackal and the dead Thorn baby in a marked grave somewhere, instead of cremating them. Lousy minions.

- In the end, Robert Thorn is shot by the diplomatic police before he can rid the world of the Antichrist, ONLY because he goes barrelling through the gate outside his own house. If he'd stashed the kid in the trunk he could've just glided out of there and gotten a pizza on the way to the church.

- In the remake, Robert Thorn has ample time to stab Damien but stops to say a prayer first. Laaaaaaame.

In actual conclusion, two final points in favor of the remake.

- Casting Mia Farrow as Mrs. Baylock was a genius move, and I wish the casting of the main characters had been as good.

- I love that it opened on June 6th, 2006. It's the kind of triple six that comes along once every thousand years and I'm just glad that somebody commemorated it properly.