A Black Mass…
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The Omen (1976): 8/10
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Damien: Omen II (1978): 7/10
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The Final Conflict: Omen III (1981): 5/10
The rare example of a horror trilogy with three distinct chapters that tell a complete and finite story, the
Omen films, while decreasing in quality with each installment, nevertheless remain an intriguing experiment. The 1976 original (the first major directorial outing for Richard Donner, who’d use the film’s considerable commercial success to land the plum assignment of directing
Superman: The Movie two years later) is the best of the bunch, a taut, well-acted thriller about a well-to-do middle-aged couple, Robert and Kathy Thorn (Gregory Peck and Lee Remick) who lose their baby in childbirth. Lacking the courage to break the terrible news to his wife, Robert is compelled by a priest to adopt a young baby in the same Rome hospital who lost his mother in childbirth the same night (“She need never know”). They happily raise the child, whom they name Damien (the chipmunk-cheeked Harvey Stephens) to the age of five...and then people around them start to die, in a series of bizarre “accidents”. Is there some malign import around this rash of deaths? And why is Damien suddenly receiving a load of attention, both malign and protective/possessive, from a variety of sources? Why, yes, he IS the literal Son Of Satan, and Robert must come to grips with making an unforgivable decision for the greater good of mankind.
The Omen is a slick, engrossing, well-paced thriller with numerous memorable sequences (including a famous cinematic beheading) and fine performances from Peck – lending his old-Hollywood gravitas to fairly pulpy material – and Remick. That said, it’s not
quite a classic, falling short of other paranoid religious-flavored horror films of the period like
Rosemary’s Baby and
The Exorcist. Still, it’s frightfully good, and Jerry Goldsmith’s chilling score (which, incredibly, earned him the only Oscar of his long and brilliant career) is definitely the icing on the cake.
In
Damien: Omen II, we re-visit Damien seven years later, where he’s now a strapping lad of twelve (and played by Jonathan Scott-Taylor) and living with Robert Thorn’s brother, Richard (William Holden, adding a similar dash of class to the genre proceedings as Peck did) his second wife (Lee Grant) and his cousin, Mark (Lucas Donat). Entering military school, Damien’s life seems pretty set…until the school’s Sergeant (Lance Henriksen, in an early film role) sets him on the road to discovering his Satanic lineage. Directed with faceless efficiency by Don Taylor (replacing Mike Hodges a few days into the production, although Hodges retains a co-screenplay credit with Stanley Mann) and set to another terrific Goldsmith score (the ghastly, guttural choral croak that accompanies the jet-black crow that serves as Damien’s familiar is a particular standout),
Omen II is a perfectly serviceable follow-up that plays like an early example of Hollywood’s penchant for constructing franchise sequels around “setpieces” more than a well-constructed narrative (there’s a subplot with subordinate Robert Foxworth buying up land for Holden’s Thorn Industries company – and possibly murdering landowners who refuse to sell -- that goes nowhere), but on that level, the film constructs and executes a number of grisly death scenarios with enthusiastic panache (the death of Thorn Industries bigwig Lew Ayres beneath the surface of an icy lake is a standout). Patchy, but fun.
Finally,
The Final Conflict leaps ahead two decades to Damien an age 32 (now portrayed by a devilishly handsome and charismatic Sam Neill), as he consolidates his clout as the head honcho of Thorn Industries into a bid for the position of Ambassador to Great Britain, utilizing some of his trademark, gruesome “accidents” to pave the way…but his finds his ascension to power threated by the literal Second Coming of Christ, and he sets off a ghoulish plot to murder every child born on the specific date of the Nazarene’s prophesized return. Neill is terrific in the lead role, given many juicy monologues to deliver, and Goldsmith delivers his finest score for the trilogy, a virtual dark opera that stands with some of his all-time best work (with a particularly thrilling cue for a fox hunt midway through the picture), and yet it’s fitting that this particular Conflict was the Final one, because the series is coasting on fumes by this point. It’s not especially terrible, but there’s nothing you haven’t seen before in this particular series, and the snoozy pacing doesn’t help. Were it not for series MVP Goldsmith’s phenomenal music lifting up the proceedings, I would probably have less charitable things to say about the film as a whole. Not a bad end to a series of films, but it should have delivered more of a punch as a concluding chapter.