Overall Rating
  Awesome: 71.43%
Worth A Look: 12.24%
Average: 4.08%
Pretty Bad: 7.14%
Total Crap: 5.1%
3 reviews, 80 user ratings
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| Omen, The (1976) |
by PaulBryant
"Just a mischievous, rambunctious kid? Was Cosmo Kramer right?"
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For some reason a bunch of people decided to get together and remake Richard Donner’s now-classic 1976 bit of suspense-horror, The Omen. My guess is that the only real reason this is happening (beyond the obvious money-making motives which drive most all filmmaking) is because they’ve been able to finish and promote the film for the perfect, once-in-a-century release date, 6 June, 2006 - or, expressed in those famous Biblical numbers, 6-6-6.Who knows what they’ll do with the remake, but it is hard to imagine the original will be topped. Though not a brilliant film by anyone’s stretch of the imagination, Donner’s flick is crafty, economical, and packs a psychological punch that so many films in the so-called horror genre nowadays rarely achieve. In current horror movies, more blood is almost always the order of the day. So much so that I worry that this is what we’re in for with the remake: a bloodified gore fest in lieu of the most intriguing parts of the original Omen, the tension-fraught sequences before and after the instances of violence.
Unlike William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, which had the precondition of Devil-belief at its grotesque heart, The Omen proves to be thankfully, though not pristinely, more ambiguous. This ambiguity, even if one has to look past a lot of directorial manipulation to get to it, makes the film rather interesting as it offers a reading of the film for the skeptic who says ‘What’s all this about an Antichrist and why is Gregory Peck convinced he has one?’ as well as the viewer who says ‘See! See! The Devil’s greatest lie is that He doesn’t exist and The Omen shows the Book of Revelation is right that the earthly number of The Beast will be 666!’
The plot basically flows like this. The wife of an American ambassador (wife played by Lee Remick, ambassador played by Gregory Peck) gives birth to a stillborn baby on, you guessed it, the 6th of June at, that’s right, 6 A.M. She is not told of her baby’s status, and in hopes of not sending his wife into depression, ambassador Peck decides to adopt a baby born in the hospital at the exact same time, whose mother doesn’t want him. This seems a good decision at the time, but as the child (whom they name Damien) grows up it appears he might be different from other little boys. Damien never gets sick, he repels members of the animal kingdom with alarming force (except dogs, as dogs are always evil), and his nannies have a penchant for going nuts. Soon, a priest comes to Peck’s office to tell him his son is, in fact, the Antichrist, and plants the seed in Peck’s mind that Damien is responsible for the wave of horrible occurrences that plague the family. This appears to be a logical explanation as Damien’s nanny commits suicide, Peck’s wife has a unfortunate fall off their balcony, and general disorder envelops the ambassador’s life.
Based on a rather plain reading of the plot, the viewer could infer that little Damien was in fact the spawn child of the Devil. You could believe that the woman who gave him over to Gregory Peck really was impregnated by a jackal, and that now Damien is almost unwittingly rising from the “Eternal Sea” – a quote from the film which is translated conveniently as being “the world of politics” – to create his Empire of Evil on earth. But then, if he really was The Beast, it seems ridiculous that he would have such a hard time killing his earthly father, whom he lets survive throughout the whole picture without hardly a scratch even though Peck drives around in how many cars and flies around in how many planes? Pretty lousy excuse for a Devil-child if you ask me.
In any case, this interpretation is absurd. I prefer the reading Richard Donner talks about in an interview from The Omen DVD, which I happen to own. The director explains that he always saw the film as a portrait of the psychological decline into insanity of the Peck and Remick characters. I lean toward this interpretation not because it explains everything in the plot as satisfyingly as does the other, more ‘horror/scary’ reading of the film, but more so because it says something interesting about the power that religious faith can wield over mankind. It explains how even the most wild, horrific, virtually unfathomable, coincidences that occur in the world can most likely be explained, and to not search out this simpler explanation in favor of opting for bizarre religious prophesies or faith-based interpretations, is nothing but a human failure. Peck is therefore correct to be initially skeptical when the priest tells him Damien is evil and that he must be killed in order to save mankind. Consequently, the evolution of his character after this initial skepticism is not one of gradually realizing the truth, but instead of being led further and further away from it.
But in the end I think I mostly enjoy The Omen for sentimental reasons – sentimental reasons being hardly rational, but reasons all the same. I vividly recall seeing it as a youngish child with my parents, no doubt up too late on a rainy Saturday night. The rented VHS version scared the proverbial hell out of that child who was me, as the idea of there being a Devil, much less an Antichrist who was only few years my junior, had probably not entered my mind. The result of a film that suggested this, naturally, was terrifying. Now, despite the fact that I’ve lost the possibility for The Omen to arouse any sort of fear within me, I look upon the terror it once produced fondly. It reminds me that cinema has a distinct, visceral power to impact people, even though this particular film can no longer impact me in that way.Seeing it now, amid a bit more knowledge and a lot less innocence, the movie produces little cold sweat and raises few goosebumps. I suppose I’ve moved past the old saw that says the greatest lie the Devil ever told is that He doesn’t exist, and concluded instead that the greatest lie mankind has ever told is that He does. After all, even if The Beast did exist and actually popped up somewhere here on earth, what disasters could he possibly inflict that would compete with the instances of human evil seen in the Holocaust, the Crusades, or the current genocide in Darfur?
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1158&reviewer=364
originally posted: 06/02/06 12:37:40
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Trilogy Starters: For more in the Trilogy Starters series, click here.
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USA
25-Jun-1976 (R)
DVD: 20-Jun-2006
UK
N/A (18)
DVD: 17-May-2001
Australia
12-Aug-1976 (R)
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