REVIEW: Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981)

Zzzzzz....zzzzz....oh, sorry, I just dozed off during today's movie. My bad. It's just...man, this is dull.

Director: Graham Baker

Starring: The Soundtrack, Sam Neill

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082377/

Man, this is shit. Who would ever willingly watch this slop anyway? It's about as convincing and scary as your grandma's old phone books. There's more padding in this movie than in your average tampon factory. You could find a better Satanic end-of-world story in a Sunday School picture book. But it's one thing to talk about Omen III: The Final Conflict and quite another to actually watch this half-assed cobble of uninteresting crap. So, if you can stay awake, let's try and slog through this stinker.

The film begins with Damien, played this time by Sam Neill. You know, the guy from In the Mouth of Madness…well I sure hope he doesn’t…do anything he would have done in that movie…Okay, this joke sucked, moving on. He is actually aware of his role as the Antichrist now, and actively prepares for the day he can finally take over the world, which is coming soon. To do this, he needs to become the ambassador to Britain. However, there’s already another guy who has that job. So what does Damien do?

Realizing what movie he was in, this guy suddenly became very scared and later went back and constructed an elaborate scheme to kill himself. The dog later went on to star in The Stuff.

Okay, so the caption may or may not have been true, but here's a slightly different version of events: through an incredibly long, drawn out sequence of nothing, backed up with the film’s ludicrously over the top soundtrack, we see that the ambassador is hypnotized by a dog, or something, and then wires his office doors to a gun which will shoot him in the face when someone opens the door. So why couldn’t Damien have just hypnotized him to shoot himself in the head? Why all the pointless padding? Oh, right, because the film had no actual captivating material, just this nonsense. Right.

And yeah, the soundtrack is REALLY over the top. I know a lot of people praise this movie's soundtrack, and sure, the music itself is fine I guess, but when you play this really froofy, overblown symphonic nonsense when it's just some guy sitting down in his chair...it doesn't exactly work, movie. It's just kinda stupid.

Then we get about five minutes straight of pointless montages of a bunch of priests preparing for the coming conflict. We get some shots of them winning some knives in an auction that apparently can kill Damien. Then we see them all standing around looking out the window of a discarded Name of the Rose set-piece at a constellation of stars, alongside an ass-numbingly long sequence of them explaining why it’s so important. I’ll sum it up in one sentence – they find out that the reincarnation of Christ will be born soon. That’s it. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO WASTE SO MUCH TIME? God.

"Man, this is really getting in the way of my game of Pong."

Oh, but one of them said it’s the final countdown, so I have to post this:

Ah, much better than the movie.

Meanwhile, Damien talks to a statue of Jesus in his alone-time and shouts ominous, evil stuff at it because, well, otherwise I guess we wouldn’t understand his evilness, or something. And he also starts seeing this reporter lady named Kate Reynolds, who has a son, and that’s about it. The group of priests plans to kill him while sitting around a dark, cramped room, and eventually spring their attack by trying to jump him as he’s doing a TV appearance, because THAT’S truly the greatest way to do it! These guys are just geniuses!

Wow, that plan really went down IN FLAMES! HA HA HA...oh wait, no.

Yeah, just a word of warning…the priests in this movie are idiots. They really don’t have any better strategies to get Damien? I mean, look at this scene, where Damien and a bunch of other guys, including Kate Reynolds’ son, are out hunting. They have one priest, because I guess ambushing him with more than that would be a dumb idea, lure him up to this bridge where this happens:

What is this, a pound opening? This really isn't tense or scary, movie.

Yep, dogs…that’s all this movie has. God. The monks can’t put together a good assassination plot for the life of them and the Antichrist is as lame as can be; what am I supposed to latch onto in this movie?! Eh. Still better than The Hulk’s villain who utilized dogs.

Yep...still lame.

There’s another attempt on his life where he’s lured out to this church in the middle of nowhere following this one old priest. The movie DID take my advice this time, as there ARE more priests teaming up this time. However, Damien pulls the old bait-and-switch, as when they think he walks through the door, they jump him and stab him to death, only to find out afterwards that it was actually one of their own priests they stabbed. Because I guess checking beforehand would’ve been stupid! These guys couldn’t plot their way out of a paper bag even if it had neon glowing sign directing them how to!

So then, and I’m not kidding here, the next fifteen minutes or so is just infanticide. That’s right, we get to see a bunch of infants getting killed, because one of them (of the ones all born between midnight and 6 AM the previous day) is supposed to be the reincarnation of Christ. Isn’t this just so peachy and cheerful? It’s pretty tasteless and doesn’t even have much of an impact visually, but there is one part that I really like:

BEACH BALL KILL! The ball hits the stroller and it rolls out in front of a truck, like a bad 1950s comedy routine gone wrong. Yeah, that’s the most random, out-of-nowhere kill I’ve seen in an Omen movie since…well, about ten minutes ago, I guess. How come nobody in this crazy world can come up with any plausible, efficient kills? Why are they all so ridiculous? And for that matter, what if the woman or someone else caught up to the stroller and stopped it before the truck hit it? Would Damien just go “Oh, snap,” and then make the baby spontaneously combust?

So it turns out there’s really only one baby left and it belongs to Damien’s right hand man. Now this brings up another stupid moment – all movie up to now, the assistant guy has been telling everyone that his son was born BEFORE the cut-off date for the supposed Christ reincarnations. Even though he’s been lying, for some reason Damien just went along with it. How can Damien not tell that his assistant is lying? Can’t he like…see into peoples’ minds or something? And even if he couldn’t, why not just look at the medical records for proof? He knows where all the OTHER babies are that were born at the right time, but he can’t figure out that one of his own employees is lying to him? For a future ruler of all darkness, Damien kinda sucks.

Oh, and how about this, where the priests get so desperate for ideas that they just start going around door-to-door of all the people with new babies born who could be the Christ reincarnation and telling them they’re in danger. He talks to Damien’s right hand man’s wife, and tells her what’s going on, and she believes him. However, he then talks to that Kate Reynolds chick, who’s supposed to be a smart reporter, and she doesn’t believe him, as she just goes to hang out with him the next day anyway and ends up having sex with him, because again, being the Antichrist gets you chicks:

She really knows how to pick 'em. How does this supposedly rational journalist not see who Damien really is, anyway?  Oh yeah because the plot depends on stupidity...

And all at the same time, her son has been possessed, or something, by Damien and is now working for him to spy on the priests. Man, banging the woman AND using her son as a minion; Damien sure knows how to get around! That priest guy comes back to talk to Kate again, and says that he knows that her son is working for Damien. Apparently he DOESN’T realize that the kid has been stalking him the whole time, though…pretty stupid…man, I’m bored; let’s just wrap this up in a paragraph:

Damien kidnaps the son and makes Kate lead her to where the Christ child is, because somehow she knows that, I guess. The kid dies – man, this movie really likes killing off kids for some reason – and then the priest dies, too. Damien wanders around a bit, wondering how come he’s fighting against his girlfriend, as in real life, Sam Neill and Lisa Harrow were dating around this time. But I guess they were having some problems:

This movie is a waste of time if I ever saw one. Nothing has any weight or drama to it, all the deaths are stupid as hell, there are a million little inconsistencies and plot-holes, the soundtrack is silly, the acting is bland and the story is completely trite and played out, with no surprises. Why would I ever watch this again? Oh, wait, no reason. Omen III is horrible and anything involved with it is horrible, too. A Satanic film so bad that it actually turns around and just starts reading the Bible again.

The images do not belong to me, they are copyright of their original owners.