Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn't impervious to the
sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there's I Watched This
On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking
yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of
a real reward. And a good time.
Cultural (and personal) infamy: This I Watched This On
Purpose entry has been 27 years in the making. As a kid, I fell victim to
early-onset cinephilia. Early symptoms included poring over the daily paper to
look at movie ads and reviews, especially the Thursday and Friday editions,
when the new reviews ran and studios ran the really big ads for that week's new
releases. For a while, I even kept a scrapbook of favorite ads, with special
pride of place given to a full-page ad for Return Of The Jedi. But the habit began a
few years earlier. I can distinctly remember being confused as a 7-year-old by
the ads for the 1980 "Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol compete over who will lose
their virginity first" comedy Little Darlings, but sensing that there
was something dirty about it. And I knew there was something dirty about the tiny
ads for the porn theaters showing movies like Champagne For Breakfast. (Looking it up now, I
see that the main character is named "Champagne." Aha.)
But a different sort of ad filled me with fear and
fascination: horror movies. At the height of the slasher trend, I obsessed over
ads for movies like My Bloody Valentine and Prom Night, speculating on the
terrors promised in their lurid graphics. I wasn't allowed to watch such
movies, but had a friend who claimed to have seen all of them, and would make
up plots to satisfy my curiosity. I didn't realize until years later that he
was lying. Turns out that New Year's Evil isn't about tiny creatures that invade
homes and eat their victims' feet. Maybe it should have been.
Cultivated alongside this budding obsession was a
complementary fixation on the end of the world. I grew up in the hot end of the
Cold War, when nuclear annihilation seemed somewhat probable. I also grew up in
a Baptist church that strongly suggested the end times were at hand. By then,
years before Left Behind, evangelical Christians specializing in Biblical prophecy had
already created a fairly coherent narrative that found parallels between Bible
verses and contemporary events. The signs of the End, we were told, were all
around us. I suppose that the looming apocalypse wasn't on the minds of every
kid in America in the early '80s, but it was very much on mine.
Thus the ads for 1981's The Final Conflict, billed as "the last
chapter of the Omen trilogy," filled me with special dread. I'd never seen the
1976 movie The Omen, but I knew its basic premise—the antichrist comes to
Earth in the form of a child named Damien—and I knew scenes from
history-of-horror movie-clip shows that used to air on television to fill space
around Halloween. The ad featured a malevolent-looking actor, playing the
grown-up Damien, standing in front of the presidential seal. In my imagination,
this was a movie that would present the full horrors of the End Times as
suggested by the Biblical book of Revelations, a horror that, since it was in
the Bible, was accessible to me in a way horror movies were not. I imagined a
Satanic president ordering suffering on his people. Missiles falling from the
sky. The population forced to take the Mark Of The Beast. Etc. Etc. This movie
had to be terrifying.
And yet, even when I was old enough to rent movies
on my own, and I started to catch up on all those horror movies that once filled
me with dread, I never watched it. I don't know why. Maybe I didn't want to be
disappointed by the reality of the movie vs. the movie I'd built in my mind.
Maybe it's because, when I saw Richard Donner's The Omen, I thought it kind of
sucked. Gregory Peck is ridiculously overqualified as the unwitting adoptive
father of the Li'l Devil, and the whole film is basically one long excuse for
elaborate death scenes that happen near the boy. And it isn't like The Final
Conflict
has a great reputation, either. Variety noted, "The Final Conflict is the last chapter in
the Omen
trilogy, which is too bad, because this is the funniest one yet." Roger Ebert,
after singling out its opening scene for praise, wrote, "If Armageddon is as
boring as this movie, we'll need a program to tell the players."
The viewing experience: Still, keeping this column
in mind, I decided to check it out when the Blu-Ray set The Omen Collection landed on my desk. And
you know what? It pretty much sucks.
Sam Neill plays the grown-up Damien. Maybe his
subsequent work in movies like Jurassic Park has clouded my vision,
but I don't find Sam Neill terribly frightening. Potentially misguided and
frustrated? Sure. Knowingly evil? That's a tougher sell. (It doesn't help that he
looks like a Jack Kirby-drawn good guy.) And unlike in The Omen—and, apparently, Damien:
Omen II,
which I have not seen—Neill's Damien is aware of his demonic destiny. He
even has a mortal aide de camp (Don Gordon) who's in on the whole
becoming-the-evil-master-of-the-world scheme. They're in a good position to
pull it off, too. With the world in the midst of a "Great Recession," the
Damien-controlled Thorn Industries is riding high, thanks to its control of much
of Earth's food supply. Damien uses this to leverage his way into the position
of ambassador to England. But first, he has to make sure the position is
vacant, which he accomplishes by having one of the series' demonic Rottweilers psychically
command the current ambassador to kill himself. (Shades of Budd Dwyer, he
commits suicide after calling a press conference. And in typical Omen fashion, he rigs up a
Rube Goldberg-like contraption that shoots him as a chipper-looking bunch of
reporters enter the room.)
Why does Damien need to go to England? Because it
was foretold in the completely made up biblical book of Hebron that the second
coming of Christ will arise "out of the Angel Isle." (At this point, I must
point out that the name of England comes from the word "Angles" as in "Angles
and Saxons." Not "angel." But anyway…) More likely: England is where they had
the budget to film the movie.
Successfully nestled in the embassy post, Damien
sets about preparing to squash Jesus 2.0 before he can rise to power. This also
involves dodging a bunch of priests carrying the seven magic daggers that can
kill him. Fortunately, they're a bunch of bumblers. In the movie's most
elaborate death scene, one of the priests tries to stab Damien on live
television, only to trip and then burn alive between sheets of plastic while
swinging back and forth in front of the cameras. This incident somehow leads to
a friendship and tentative romance with the interviewer (Lisa Harrow), whose
creepy kid comes to look up to Damien. Why? Because it wouldn't be an Omen movie without a creepy
kid. (It also wouldn't be one without a demon dog, which I found especially
non-scary, since this movie's Rottweiler looked an awful lot like my extremely
sweet German Shepherd/Rottweiler hybrid Sophie, who's only demonic when she
wants to be taken for a walk, while I'd rather sit on the couch and watch 30
Rock on
DVD.)
Ebert wasn't kidding about this movie being dull.
Director Graham Baker, later to helm Alien Nation and the John Stamos drama Born To Ride,
has little gift for atmosphere, and apart from one inspired sequence, I suspect
I'll forget every aspect of this movie in a couple of days. Still, that
sequence does bear mentioning. After meeting with his hundreds of English
followers in a canyon, Damien orders them to kill all children born on a
certain day. Cue a long stretch of scenes in which random people murder random
babies that's so over-the-top, it quickly turns into comedy. At one point, I
started to feel sorry for the Foley artist who had to imagine what the sound of
a baby being suffocated during a baptism would sound like.
As things wind to an end, Damien has a sex scene
with Harrow's reporter that takes a rough and, it's strongly implied, anal
turn. I mention this only because Wikipedia notes that the 1983 novel Omen
IV: Armageddon 2000—which
has nothing to do with the fourth film in the Omen, ahem, trilogy, the 1991
TV movie Omen IV: The Awakening—plays off this scene by having the reporter
give "rectal birth" to something called "the abomination" after Damien's death.
Oops, I started to give away the ending. I'll
finish. Yeah, Damien dies after getting stabbed by one of the magical daggers.
And then an image of Jesus returns, as if to taunt him, as Jerry Goldsmith's
choral score shifts from creepy to Jesus-y.
It's a pretty weak ending to a pretty weak movie
that bore no resemblance to the horrors created by my young mind. What do you do
when the demons of youth turn out to be pussycats?
How much of the experience wasn't a total waste
of time? Under
10 percent. The slaughter-of-the-British-babies scene works as unintended
comedy. But otherwise, it's a lot of Sam Neill glowering while foreboding music
plays. Apocalypse not.