Satan's Adoption Agency (The Omen [1976] (DVD))

Member Name: george_lazenby

Product:	The Omen [1976] (DVD)
Date:	13/02/02 (142 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Exceptionally entertaining

Disadvantages: Daft

Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) is the American ambassador to Rome, and on a dark night, his wife (Lee Remick) gives birth to a child which takes one breath, and then dies. Convinced that his wife will never get over the shock, a priest offers to allow Thorn to adopt an orphaned child as if it was his own, and his wife will never know. Thorn is then transferred to the UK, and things start to go a little awry. As young Damien grows up, he starts to attract misfortune - his nanny throws herself from the roof of the family home during a birthday party, the replacement (Billie Whitelaw) is a psychopath, and he throws a fit when he approaches a church.

I don't need to tell you any more - you know exactly what's going on in 'The Omen'; generations of kids have now been cursed in the playground purely because of unwise parents and ill-chosen names. We had a Damien at our school, and his life was, appropriately, hell.

'The Omen' is a film about the Anti-Christ; Damien is the son of Satan, dropped into Thorn's family like a cuckoo drops its egg into the nest of another bird. Thorn himself seems destined for the presidency, and Damien has been positioned to ensure maximum power as he grows up. With a huge budget, prestige stars and produced by a big studio, 'The Omen' was made in the shadow of William Friedkin's 'The Exorcist', a massively successful horror film based on the potent mix of demonology and religion. But whereas William Peter Blatty's book and Friedkin's film of it captured, perhaps for the only time in cinema, a genuine sense of the demonic, a real insight into something unexplainable and really horrific, 'The Omen' gathers together the right pieces (stars, solid director, a demonic plot about an evil child) for a much more commercial, mainstream package.

This isn't to say 'The Omen' is a bad film - it's a very good one - but what 'The Exorcist' does i
s to conjure up a frightening, fearful atmosphere which haunts you for days. 'The Omen' is simply a Rolls-Royce suspense film, very stylishly mounted and packed with incident, but fundamentally designed to entertain rather than undermine. Most of the films which followed 'The Exorcist' were either crappy ripoffs ('The Devil Within') or big dumb studio nonsense ('The Sentinel', Holocaust 2000'). 'The Omen' is like a machine; once it starts, it runs on rails. Every couple of minutes there is some new horrific incident - accidents, violent encounters, supernatural happenings. It's like a rollercoaster ride which never seems to stop.

The first half - with Peck receiving persistent warnings from an Irish priest (Patrick Troughton) while Remick rapidly cottons on to her son's evil nature - is very creepy. And all the while, photo-journalist David Warner is gradually piecing together the story through a series of bizarre photographs, leading up to the second section, a bizarre and gripping search for the truth.

Even though David Seltzer later denounced his script as written entirely for the cash, it's still a superb piece of portentous thriller writing. The film ends up loaded with wild incidents, and some superb shock moments (the bit where David Warner reveals the photograph of himself is superb). Richard Donner directs with full-blooded enthusiasm, handling the set-piece deaths with style, and managing to keep a straight-face on a plot which could easily have descended into farce. Whatever else, the final sequences of 'The Omen' are devious and subversive (revolving as they do around a plot to murder a child), and Donner conjures up one shock moment the equal of the 'Alien' chestburster, and the 'Scanners' exploding head.

What seals the film's success are the performances - Peck is superb, retaining all his gravitas as a man gradually being tortured by appallin
g revelations. He's probably the only actor in Hollywood who could convincingly play out the last scene. Meanwhile Remick, one of the most underrated actress of the 60s and 70s gives a surprisingly moving (in context) account of the gradually unhinged mother. A supporting cast of outstanding British character actors (Warner, Troughton, Leo McKern, and the magnificent Billie Whitelaw as Damien's protector) help to make the supernatural goings-on more convincing.

This isn't profound - it's a robust piece of entertainment with moments of extreme violence and one of the daftest plots going - but watch it for ten minutes and I guarantee you'll be hooked.


The film is available in a very nice three DVD set with its jolly but incredibly silly sequels; you'd have to be a fan of ridiculous death sequences and wailing-choir soundtracks to own it, but it's a fun way to spend a day off.

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