I feel cheated. I wanted to watch this on Inauguration Night because I thought Damien became President and he doesn't! Also, the film is rubbish, but I fully expected that and so I don't feel cheated about that.
I've watched Damien: Omen II recently (4/10) and it felt like one of the Hammer Dracula series but in reverse. Hammer were always left with the difficulty of resurrecting Chris Lee after he had been destroyed at the end of the last one (blood spilt on his ashes etc), here the difficulty was in how anyone could ever get Damien- everyone who had ever suspected him, every shred of evidence that he was the Anti-Christ and the only daggers that could kill him were all destroyed in a fire at the climax of the second movie.
Well, they dealt with the daggers early on. The movie opens with some rubble being cleared and the daggers (apparently dug out of cement, though I've no idea how they got there) are stolen by a man who pawns them. The pawnbroker puts them up for auction where they are bought by a Priest (rich feller, these are antique artifacts) who gives them to a particular Italian Monastery.
A little while on, we see a gang of Priests in said Monastery discussing the knives. The head Monk (Rossano Brazzi- Beckerman from The Italian Job- who is the only actor to emerge from this with any credit) explains that he received a letter from another now-deceased Monk saying that Damien Thorn is the Devil. Right so that's sorted. I'm so stupid, I at least expected them to have a go at credibly explaining it. Pah! He later explains that he is certain about Damien being the Anti-Christ thus: "there is a commandment 'thou shalt not bear false witness'... if there was even a shred of doubt in my mind, my faith would not allow me to say these things". Of course there's no doubt, he received a letter after all!
I've spent too long on this already, it doesn't deserve it! Sam Neill is horrific veering from anodyne to hammy and back, completely skipping believable on the way. His jaw-clenched eye-rolling throaty address to his disciples- a nurse! a priest! two boy-scouts! the horror!- is painful. His support actors are Steve McQueen's best mate Don Gordon (The Towering Inferno, Papillon, Bullitt) who is sleepwalking and an out-of-her-depth Lisa Harrow. Oh and Bob Cryer from The Bill. In a moustache.
The shocking deaths that you expect from Omen films include the US Ambassador fixing up a pistol to shoot himself in the head when a door opens tripping a Mousetrap-type contraption and a couple of boring deaths off-screen. I'm not fussed about that, gore bores me, but when you think where the film's target audience tends to set its expectations, it's an odd decision.
Let's be positive- it's a day for hope and positivity after all- the Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack is classy and Rossano Brazzi deserves credit for keeping going when everyone around him has given up. So, 2/10.
