REVIEW: The Exorcist (1973)

If I had a nickel for every demonic possession movie that came out these last five years or so, I’d be rich enough to make sure there was never another one. I mean honestly. What subset of movies has been sucked dry more than this? Let's just take a look at some of these wonderfully creative films which have so much of their own ideas...

 

...and the list goes on. It’s gone beyond beating a dead horse and more into beating a dead horse with the flogged carcass of another dead horse, while sitting on a third dead horse. Where does it end? Where did it begin?

Well, we can answer the second question.

Director: William Friedkin

Starring: Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn

IMDb

Yes, The Exorcist, often touted as one of the scariest movies ever made. And rightly so. It’s a masterpiece. It is one of the most richly textured horror films out there, as much a drama as it is a horror film really. But at the same time, it also packs some of the blackest, vilest depths of evil you will ever see in a film. But to truly understand this masterpiece of cinema, we must call a priest and have him cast out everything from the movie so we can examine it.

The movie begins slowly, with an old man out in Iraq discovering some mysterious artifacts that remind him of something long-past that we don’t know about yet. We get some quiet build-ups that really just establish his character and the hesitation he’s going through. We fade out on a shot of him standing in the desert against a demonic shadow figure.

Pretty damn effective and ominous.

Then we get our main characters, Regan and Chris, who are both women born in that strange ambiguous time when men and womens’ names seemed to be interchangeable. Chris is an actress and spends her time trying to make her hairdo as gender-ambiguous as her name. When she’s not doing that, she hangs out with her British director, Burke Dennings, and plays with Regan in the evenings. Regan has made a new invisible friend named Captain Howdy, who I think used to hang out with the Devil’s Rejects cast before this movie.

Another difference between then and now: parents would immediately become suspicious in 2013 if their little girls started saying they were hanging out with Captain Howdy.

So the movie unfolds pretty slow and comfortably, taking its time to set up its characters. Shit – most modern movies would have had about twenty jump scares at this point. Some people might confuse this kind of pacing as sluggish, but I like it. It sets up everything very well and you get to like the characters pretty well. We get introduced to our other main character in Father Damien Karras, a priest in the city losing his faith while his ailing mother passes away under the gaze of uncaring relatives.

Here’s another thing this does so well – it really does a good job with those scenes of people trying to figure out what’s wrong with Regan. To start with, there really isn’t much of a transition into her getting sick. We get introduced to the character, she seems okay, and after we return from some of the Father Karras scenes, she’s just in the hospital – bam. No other explanation needed. I love how we find out a lot of the stuff wrong with her just through Chris talking with the doctors. There are no goofy over the top jump scares and no bullshit mythos – it’s all very grounded in reality at first, which is really the way to go. Unfortunately these days, we are so over-saturated with these kinds of stories and we have the Internet to contend with, so it wouldn’t be believable quite as much to have a scene like this in, say, The Last Exorcism III: The Dead Horse.

In The Exorcist though, we get some very good, detailed scenes of hard-working doctors trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with Regan. There are some expensive medical treatments and some very uncomfortable scenes. The film, again, takes its time. Remember in my Paranormal Activity review when I said research isn’t scary? This is the exception.

The reason is because it’s all so slowly built up – the film crawls toward its point by establishing that the characters really have no other options to turn to. Chris is pushed to her breaking point and simply cannot find any other explanation except the supernatural. She becomes so desperate that she ends up accepting the one thing she never thought she would: demonic forces from another plane of existence.

"Hmmm...my diagnosis is, you're fucked."

That’s really, really good, actually. If you’ve never seen this movie before, let me go back and explain a bit – in the middle of the research scenes where the doctors are puzzled about what’s wrong with Regan, one of the doctors asks if she or Regan has any religious beliefs. Chris replies that no, neither one of them do. Which would be a fairly commonplace thing nowadays – many people are atheists now and it’s not something to be ashamed of. Most people don’t even blink at that. But this was the 70s, when we as a country were just starting to come out of the long shadow of the Church and of religion in general. It was a confusing, transitional time and people were moving away from the old guard of religious beliefs – the world was changing.

And that’s the cincher right there – that’s why this movie is so scary. Because it takes a woman who, by all accounts is rational and modernistic in this world, and shows her that really, everything we know as sophisticated, civilized and modern is just a bunch of shit. Really, the old world never left and it never will leave – the old world is eternal and the Devil is real. That’s fuckin’ terrifying, man. That’s the pitch blackest horror there is. The Exorcist takes our changing, atheistic and unchristian world and turns it upside down.

The expression on their faces sums up the movie for me: pure fear masked by a shaky confidence in science and manmade inventions, even though what lies beneath the Earth is about to take over. Terrifying.

So yeah, I guess I should talk about the Regan devil-possession scenes…they’re pretty damned gross. I don’t think these scenes by themselves are anything that scary as much as they are disturbing. I mean, especially if you don’t like people vomiting up green bile. In that case, don’t watch Troll 2. You’ll probably have an aneurysm.

There's one for the family photo albums!

These scenes are just crazy. I mean, there’s one scene where she scuttles down the stairs backwards with her mouth bleeding. I don’t think there’s enough antibiotics in the world for that. Plus, this scene comes on the tails of Regan discovering that her director friend is dead and that Regan’s doctors can’t help her. Jesus. Can this woman’s life get any worse? Why not just add in the fact that she doesn’t get to appear in the sequel to the mix?

Oh, well, that last one – probably a plus…but still:

So we get some scenes of this detective guy who looks like a drunk, out-of-work Paul Newman investigating Father Karras – ironically, he says Father Karras looks like Paul Newman. Maybe having Paul Newman in this movie wouldn’t have been a bad idea. You could have had him be the possessed one. That would be something…especially if he played the role of the daughter just like Linda Blair does. I’m not going to post a picture of that, but just let it sit in your mind for a while: a little girl contracts an otherworldly possession and turns into Paul Newman. Terrifying.

And yes, I fully realize the above passage will never be entered into the annals of my all-time funniest jokes on the blog. Shut up. The detective guy’s only character seems to be inviting the people he interrogates to go see movies with him. I guess it’s supposed to be a way to try and bribe them, but I dunno; I’m more inclined to think he just has no friends after letting the killer in 12 Angry Men go free.

Well I never!

Either way he doesn’t get very far, and the movie mostly focuses on Chris’s attempts to save Regan. She finally consults with Father Karras, who has become a tortured soul after his mother passed away. Karras takes her seriously enough to start an investigation into whether or not Regan’s case merits an exorcism.

This is yet another difference from most other movies that took influence from The Exorcist: these scenes actually take their time and feel realistic. The Church above all is not just some transparent entity that lets people do whatever they want – there are rules. And very few times – much less in films like The Possession, The Devil Inside or The Conjuring – would they actually just allow an exorcism. But here we have the exception: this is the case that throws everyone for a loop, that proves the Church wrong after years of nothing, here’s another exorcism they have to do, nestled in this modern agnostic world.

Movies today just treat exorcisms like any other everyday thing: “Oh, damn, time for another exorcism again. Want to meet for coffee after?” Just try and tell me with a straight face that any of the scenes in The Conjuring that try and make this idea suspenseful are any good. Fucking please. This is the real deal. Here it feels like things matter. You, the viewer, feel the weight of Karras’s discovery and of the decision to perform the exorcism. That matters a lot.

They recruit Father Merrin, who was the old man from the opening, to come and help out. Apparently because Merrin has so much experience after almost dying the last time he did an exorcism. How do you think that conversation went? “Hey, Father Merrin…remember that time you almost died doing that extremely dangerous exorcism? …Want to do it again?” How rude.

So then we get the exorcism scenes, which are great in part just because any movie that can make two guys standing over a wrinkled Muppet reject and shouting “The power of Christ compels you!” suspenseful is doing something right.

"And for my next trick, I'll make a sequel without any logic or sense in it whatsoever!"

But we quickly find out that it doesn’t work as well as they’d like. Karras tries, but the demon in Regan just won’t let him forget his dearly departed mother, channeling her at every turn to rattle him. Karras has to go downstairs, and when he comes back up, Father Merrin has been killed by the demon. Losing control, Karras goes and strangles Regan until the demon leaves her and comes into him instead. Then he jumps out a window and dies, ending the demon’s reign of terror forever…or until the two sequels came out. But either way, hurray!

The ending does raise some interesting questions though – they went through all that ritualistic bullshit when the real way to beat the demon was just to strangle it out with your bare hands? How stupid they must be feeling now! Ha ha…a good man just lost his life. But seriously though. I really do like the subtext here: religion isn’t all-powerful, the Church isn’t all-knowing. In place of a holy, sacrosanct ritual, it’s blunt violence that wins the day in this movie. That’s pretty important.

And it’s a very important movie. As gruesome and unpleasant as The Exorcist can be, it really is a prime example of horror working outside its bounds and making something artistic and meaningful, while still being scary and suspenseful. It’s the best of both worlds, and an all-time classic. If you’ve never seen this, and are enamored with its pale imitators…well, you need to treat yourself to this movie this Halloween. Whether or not you agree with me that its modern-day imitators are crap, there is no denying the power of The Exorcist.

Happy Halloween!

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: V/H/S (2012)

Found footage movies are really something these days – pretty much, they’ve morphed into their own genre. With Blair Witch Project being a cultural phenomenon but in actuality a boring, dull movie, and its next-generation spawn Paranormal Activity being along the same lines, it’s surprising that the genre has produced such good works in other, less known capacities. First there was [REC], and then Grave Encounters, and now this, perhaps the best of them all. Ladies and gents, I am talking about V/H/S.

Directors: Various

Starring: Video tapes, static, annoying douchebag criminals, cameras

IMDb

Aside from being annoying to type out because of those dashes in the title – WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS! – this is one of the best horror movies of recent times, with strong directing, strong writing and a hell of an intuition to scare its audience. V/H/S is just totally Satanic, gleeful fun, and while I could just espouse more words to tell you how awesome it is, it’d be more fun to just watch the thing again and take you all on a tour…OF HELL!

So we start off with some assholes…being assholes. They go around and lift up girls’ shirts and get paid for it on the Internet. What a bunch of wastes of air. They get hired to go into this house and steal a video tape, and they get mad when it’s not in the cupboard in the kitchen, which is obviously the first place to look for a video tape:

"I always keep video tapes in the cupboard! It's not weird!!!"

Then they come across a dead guy in a chair surrounded by video tapes, and they decide to sit down and watch the videos, because that’s a good idea. Don’t these morons get enough cash from their, ahem, titillating videos online that they wouldn’t need to do a job where a dead guy is sitting around? I guess not.

Anyway, we then get the first story, told rather brilliantly from a camera embedded in a pair of glasses. It’s about a bunch of idiots going out to pick up chicks at a bar. They’re driving along and they talk about how much they really want to talk to some girls tonight. That’s right – talk to them. Not have sex with them, or even make out with them…talk to them. Conversation, ohhhhh yeah…that’s some steamy stuff going on there!

They get kicked out eventually and go back to their hotel room with two girls, one of whom looks like Emma Stone and the other like an anorexic Helena Bonham Carter on meth. At least we can’t say they don’t try to get some variety…instead of just filming these girls for an Internet show, though, they try to have sex with them! Except one of them, the Emma Stone chick, just passes out. The other one turns into a vampire and devours them all! Always a mood killer when you’re trying to get laid.

Well, you can't deny, they got what they came for...and a whole lot more...

The main guy runs out and tries to get help, but gets mauled by the crazy vampire chick, who now looks like she spent waaaay too much time at a GWAR concert:

Then the guy tries to run outside after the girl starts weeping in the corner, and tries to get help. For some reason, nobody does. So he runs across the pavement and the vampire chick flies out and grabs him, presumably taking him off to have a nice, ahem, conversation somewhere…and that’s the end of the story.

And it was awesome. This story perfectly captured the feel of a loud, claustrophobic, intoxicated night, and the characters, silly and immature as they were, got what was coming to them for it. The acting was great and the snappy, aggressive pacing just went straight for the throat. How can any fan of horror argue with stuff like this? And, hell, this wasn’t even the best story V/H/S has to offer…let us continue our journey into the strange, depraved recesses that V/H/S wants to show us.

The second story is set in Arizona! We follow a likable young woman and her likable fiancé as they go on a road trip through Arizona, hitting all the tourist destinations like the Grand Canyon as well as the Old Wild West. Most of the story, though, is set in their motel room. Hmm, a horror story that builds atmosphere with likable, realistic characters and a slow pace? Why does that sound familiar…

That’s right, it’s a Ti West story. So expect lots of semi-cutesy romantic moments broken up with realistic couple bantering and lots of petty drama, before the eventual payoff of a great horror twist at the end. Fortunately…I really like this formula, and this might be my favorite Ti West directed film yet, actually. The setting is cool and the characters are really well done, being simple enough to work in a short film setting, but still with enough layers and hints of depth to make them interesting to watch. The pace is excellent, and shows Ti West is really getting a style down, with a hell of an attention to detail and atmosphere. The acting is also very well done.

The end of the story comes so fast you barely even see it coming – basically what happens is, the mysterious stranger who showed up at the couples’ door the previous night comes back and slits the guy’s throat. The girl, as it so happens, was conspiring with this mysterious stranger, who apparently she had a relationship with in the past. The story ends with her saying, frantic and rushed, “Did you get rid of [the video]?”

"Did you make sure to show the audience that shocking footage to explain everything? Good."

That is friggin’ cool, and a twist nobody would have seen coming. Hats off – this might be my favorite story in the compilation, but there are still more to come!

The next story is about some kids going out to a cabin in the woods to reenact a Friday the 13^th film. How retro of them. The group consists of a kinda normal guy, a kinda normal girl, a slutty girl and a nerdy guy. Never seen that combination before, have you? Fortunately, like everything else in V/H/S this is actually done competently, with some really good actors who make the characters work. They’re not that likable or anything, but they’re realistic, and they pretty much get the job done.

They go out in the woods and do the things that dumb kids always do in movies like this – they jump in the water naked and smoke pot for about two seconds. In true 80s fashion, the one nerdy guy even goes on a whole anti-drug rant that’s frankly pretty hilarious. But the odd thing is that the one normal girl, who drove them all there, keeps stopping them to look at places where she says her friends got hurt. And at one point, while everyone else is walking ahead, she turns around and actually says, “You’re all gonna fuckin’ die out here!”

Pretty odd thing to say…especially if she’s trying to make sure they DON’T get suspicious. And who wouldn’t, when in the forest lies a red-faced man who is invisible except through the glitches in a video camera?!

When you see it...you'll see it...

That’s a frigging AWESOME concept. And the movie does well by it, as we see everyone get killed off bloodily and in true slasher horror fashion, probably the best slasher stuff since Hatchet, easily. Gleefully, bloodily evil and lewd. The one surviving girl sets up traps for him, and it appears she catches him…

…but then we get backhanded by one of the most cold, brutal endings in a horror film lately. Just chilling.

Oh, the next story is really something…this one is about a couple who live far away from each other and chat via webcam all the time. The guy looks bored all the time and the girl is, well…a complete idiot, for reasons you’re about to see. It’s revealed that there’s a weird bruise on the girl’s arm, and that she sometimes hears ghosts in her apartment. The guy reacts to this with a perfect monotone expression:

"Hmm...round, symmetrical and proportionate. Your boobs get an 8.5/10."

Amazing how invested he is!

We find out that apparently, rather than going to a hospital, this girl responds to a weird bruise on her arm by cutting into her arm with a knife:

Isn’t that just perfectly sane? No, really. I’m convinced now – this chick is just nuts. She clearly needs to be admitted to a mental hospital. That vacant, bright eyed look in her eyes while she’s holding up the knife is just scary more than anything; even scarier than the ghost in this story! God damn, is this nuts. And, what, her plan is to close her eyes, carry her laptop around and have the boyfriend tell her if he sees a ghost, so SHE can talk to it and “find out if it wants her to find its body or something,” as she puts it? That’s so stupid you could see it from space. I love that bit about finding out if the ghost wants her to find its body. That’s just a great mental picture, isn’t it? “The adventure of the crazy knife-wielding webcam girl to find the ghost’s body! Starring Lindsay Lohan.”

OK, OK, so she goes and hunts some ghosts until one of them shines a bright Men in Black-esque light in her face, and then she passes out. It’s revealed that apparently, the boyfriend was in the same building the whole time, as he comes down and cuts a strange fetus-like alien out of her – what a nice guy!

So, what, these two NEVER ran into one another outside, if he really lived that close? I don’t buy that. There was never any instance in their conversation where it seemed implausible or unlikely that the boyfriend was far away? Boy, the levels of total implausibility are just stunning me!

And, what, that stupid ghost is like, his sidekick or something? That’s hilarious. The magical abortion doctor, who travels the world with his ghost buddies and his trusty webcam, ready to save the women of the world from demonic babies AAAAAAAAND getting to see their tits as a bonus!

"Now now, move your arm or I won't be able to judge for the boob judging contest! Because I'm a creep-o!"

That’s right. He’s just a pervert this whole time. That’s the big plot twist with this story – the guy has more than one girl he’s doing this to. Well, we should praise this individual for standing up for our right to…to have abortions? No. Definitely not going there. Next story!

The last story is about a bunch of guys on Halloween, and with costumes like this:

…you know it’s gonna be good!

They go to some haunted house party and find that they truly know how to pick ‘em when the whole house is totally empty and vacant of anyone at all. They wander around for a bit and goof off, and it’s all pretty well and good, until they find a cult in the basement trying to sacrifice some poor girl tied between two poles, like King Kong replicated in a suburban basement. Only instead of a giant ape, these guys are trying to appease a house full of angry ghosts!

The Attack of the Killer Tableware...next month on SyFy!

They escape, taking the girl with them, only she turns out to be a bad omen when she lures the angry spirits right to them! They stop on some train tracks and, even though the guy driving tries his best, they end up stuck and a train runs them over. And the other guys in the car all die thinking that their buddy driving was actually a murderous asshole trying to kill them all by not moving out of the way of a moving train.

"Can I take a moment of your time to talk about Our Lord and Savior?"

Splendid!

So that’s V/H/S, and boy, is it awesome – this has got to be the best horror movie of 2012, and maybe of 2011 as well. I especially love how creative this is in delivering its stories. Far from just giving us pandering jump scare moments, this invents clever new ways to shoe in a camera to tell the story every time. The first story had that kid with the camera in his glasses, the second was a couple taking a vacation and filming it, in the third, you could only see the killer if you had a camera, the fourth had webcams and the fifth had a camera built into the guy’s Halloween costume.

Those are all really good, inventive ways to tell a horror story, and after all, we do live in the age where horror is about firsthand experience, about imagining the fear literally through another person’s eyes rather than a detached view like the classic stories. There have been bumps on the road, but with fierce conviction, excellent acting and creative storytelling, V/H/S has delivered a bloody, screaming good time of a horror movie. Go see it.

Images used here are not mine, they are copyright of their original owners.

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.

Review: Damien: Omen II (1978)

Director: Don Taylor

Starring: William Holden, Lee Grant, Jonathon Scott-Taylor

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077394/

I'm just going to come out and say it; I don’t really like the Omen series. Even the first one is pretty overrated. These movies aren’t the worst out there, but they’re just so played out and so trite that there’s no point in watching them more than once. The first movie had its moments, but even then it didn’t really captivate, and it was really just a tamer and dumbed down version of the other two Satanic horror bigwigs of the time, The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. And the series as a whole just doesn't provide any tension or danger – we already know Damien isn’t actually going to be killed, we know there will be mysterious deaths that mostly look like accidents or suicides, and we know people will start getting suspicious by the end. So what’s the point? Maybe if the writing was better it would be okay, but if the first one can’t even keep my interest these days, the sequel sure doesn’t have a chance. This…is Damien: Omen II.

The movie opens with the credits, which are delivered over the soundtrack, which I think is farting at us the entire time. We see the character Bugenhagen from the first movie showing some newspapers from all over the world to a colleague of his. They all have the story about the US senator and his wife from the first movie dying on the front page, and even though you’d think they would put a picture of the senator and his wife there, every article only has a picture of little Damien. I don’t know, that just strikes me as strange. Bugenhagen tells his buddy that Damien is the Antichrist, and that he needs to be destroyed.

So the colleague agrees to go to this underground ruins with him so that Bugenhagen can prove what he’s saying is true. They poke around for a bit until they find a picture of a young boy surrounded by snakes and fire and other evil things painted on the wall. They…somehow know it’s Damien, even though it could just as well be any other boy, and then right when they realize it, the ground starts shaking. Even though this kind of thing probably could have happened anywhere in this volatile underground room, Bugenhagen says it’s the Antichrist at work, and they promptly get buried underneath sand and rocks because the Antichrist presumably didn’t like their acting.

Then we cut to 7 years later, where frankly the movie could have started in the first place and not lost any momentum. But I guess they really needed the extra bit of hokey mysticism. Two boys named Damien (gasp!) and Mark are leaving to go to military school, glad to be away from their crazy, mean old aunt. The family has a discussion at the table where it’s revealed that the crazy aunt hates Damien for some reason, and the rest of the family will have none of it. So later that night a big black bird gets into her room – the family has an infestation of them this time of year, I gather – and the soundtrack becomes so ridiculous that it gives her a heart attack.

After some political garble and some history lessons, we see that the Thorn cousins are initiated into the new drill sergeant’s little regime. The drill sergeant is probably intended to be menacing and strict, but really it’s more like he’s reading his lines off a cue prompter. Oh and his name is Neff. That’s…just silly. Then we see Richard Thorn, the father and brother of the senator from the original movie, meeting the journalist who he was told was going to talk to him, a woman named Joan Hart, who we were told is a professional working on a big project about archaeology. They start to talk until she reveals that Richard’s brother met with Bugenhagen for the purposes of an exorcism, and she starts talking faster and crazier with each new development, at the end reducing to nothing but screaming at him to “Believe in Christ!” Yes, this professional, well known reporter sure does have a great method of interviewing, doesn’t she? She’s so persuasive! I wonder how anyone could turn her down.

Ugh. So after some more brilliant journalism in which she pretty much just shouts at and alienates everyone who could possibly help her or listen to her, her car comes to a stop on the road and she’s killed by one crow while the soundtrack goes on a rampage again, sounding like it’d be more credible if it were composed by a cat with Down’s syndrome.

Then we switch to the winter time at home, where it’s Mark’s birthday. Damien talks to one of the politicians from earlier in the movie about initiation, and the guy tells him that Damien’s 13^th birthday will be his ‘initiation’, and his ‘time to set aside childish things and face who he is.’ Uh…maybe if this were the year 1903 it would be. But I don’t think that’s really quite how it works in the 1980s, you morons.

The next day we see everyone playing ice hockey until the oldest member of their group, the president of Thorn’s company, falls under the ice and gets pulled away by the current until he dies, thus making the other guy, who wants to set up a progressive plan to make more money, the acting president. At the military academy, we see Damien facing off with his teacher, who accuses him of not listening in class only for Damien to get the answers right to every single question. Kid, nobody likes a show off. Just sit back down and draw some more funny pictures instead.

But no, then we see Sergeant Neff pulling Damien out of class and telling him to look in the Book of Revelations in order to find out who he really is. Pfft, I hate these military academies. They always have to try and push the same old conformist beliefs on everyone! But ooh, then Damien looks in the book like he was told and finds out he’s the Antichrist! Yeah, I remember when school teachers used to guide me on my anti-Christian path to global human domination, too. Those were the days.

Oh, and can you believe that upon discovering the classic 666 sign on his head, Damien actually runs out to the sea and shouts “Why? Why me!?” Dude, I thought that was one of those clichés that was so old that nobody ever actually used it. But hey, who am I to argue with the franchise that brought us the psychic fair in Omen IV? I must not understand the complex inner workings of this brilliant story. Yeah, that’s it.

Ocean = Dramatic; it's practically a rule.

So while Damien, Mark and some other kids are taking a tour of their father’s company workshop, something goes wrong and radioactive smoke floods the room. Every kid except Damien suffers minor side effects, and the doctor reveals that Damien’s cell structure is different. So…the Antichrist has different cell structure from regular human beings, and nobody noticed that until now. Even though the kid has been living a perfectly normal and happy life, probably going to the doctor for check-ups routinely, nobody noticed anything different about his bodily makeup until now. Yeah, right. And I’m the prince of Ecuador.

The doctor dies a horrible, bloody death, and then the next day one of Richard’s friends comes to tell him of Bugenhagen’s warnings, which he mysteriously found…Richard doesn’t believe him, but he does start to admit that something seems strange. Mark is killed in the woods after a talk with Damien, a funeral is held, and Richard becomes more and more inclined to go searching for the mysterious wall with Damien’s face on it that will prove everything, which his friend also saw. Let’s see…yup, everything expected is here. We get ominous shots of Damien looking cold and unfeeling, we get a few more mysterious deaths and then we get a rushed climax where it’s revealed that the mother was working for Damien the whole time, too. She kills Richard, and then…is burned in a fire herself, because I guess she figured out that this series sucks, and didn’t want to be in the third movie. Smart move!

So that’s Omen II, and it’s just a chore to sit through. The acting is pretty mediocre, the directing is nothing special, the music is too over the top and silly, the characters are boring and the story just isn’t that great. The entire Omen series is pretty much hack work anyway, with little to offer any seasoned horror fan. I guess this isn’t a terrible movie or anything, but it’s just so unimpressive and so droll that I can’t recommend it. Moral of the story, being the Antichrist gets you chicks.

Lucky bastard.