Tuesday, June 06, 2006

THE OMEN 666 - It's official! The EU will destroy mankind!

You know what, I am all about the Omen remake. Not because it’s a great movie but because I have seen so many piss-poor un-scary ‘70s horror remakes of late that it’s a huge relief to see anything remotely competent on screen. And this version is competent. More than that, it fulfilled the genre contract of making me jump out of my skin around 5 times in the two hour stretch, despite the fact that I had seen the original and so knew the plot. I think this comes down to the fact that the central story of THE OMEN is fascinating and terrifying, and no matter how hard you try, it is pretty hard to balls it up. In addition, we get some nice character actors giving strong supporting performances – from Pete Postlethwaite, David Thewlis and Michael Gambon to the iconic Mia Farrow. It’s all good.

Except when it isn’t. Hard-core 70s horror fans are bound to find plenty to be disappointed by, not least the weak casting of the main roles.
Liev Schreiber – usually a fine actor – gives a bizarrely understated, or should I say comatose – performance as Robert Thorn. Schreiber has obviously made a choice to play Thorn as a hard-as-nails, bottled up kind of guy. However, it seems a bit unsatisfactory that his face barely ever registers emotion given that pretty much all Thorn does in this movie is get a lot of shocking and bad news, usually related to how people he knows and love have suffered agonising deaths and how his own son may in fact be the devil’s spawn. His wife, Katherine Thorn, is played by Julia Stiles – again a fine actor, but around fifteen years too young for the role. My final quibble is that while this seems like a fairly lush, blockbuster-stylee production there are one or two glaring errors. In the climactic car chase a character rushes through the streets of England only to pass buildings with conspicuously Central European signage. Nice.

Anyways, like I said, I have a fondness for this flick. It is what it is – an above-average remake of a horror classic that, despite its manifold flaws, still managed to scare me silly a couple of times. Job done.

THE OMEN 666 is on global release. P.S. The reference in the title of this review is to the assertion in the movie that one of the portents of Armageddon is the rising of the Roman Empire. David Thewlis' character interprets this as the signing of The Treaty of Rome.

2 comments:

  1. The EU is the beast of revelations, with the antichrist Pope of Rome, that man of sin, son of perdition, the Whore of Babylon at its pinnacle. Beware sub-dermal microchip implants, they're the mark of the beast. One world government. Walmart. MIHOP, the UN.

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  2. yeah, man, I always knew the EU was whack!

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