It's Truly Astonishing How They Managed to do Almost Everything Worse...
Despite the fact that it's a damn near carbon copy. I saw the same thing happen with Psycho so I can't say I'm exactly surprised, it just pisses me off as a movie fan. Conversely however I'm also weirdly thankful for movies like this, because they make me appreciate the talent of those involved with the original even more. We get to see what it would've been like if a different director and crew were essentially handed the same material. I don't even know where to begin because there's so many problems with this movie (this'll be a long post), but to elaborate so that the three or four fans of this so-called remake don't think I'm trolling, let's just break this down (here be major spoilers for the Omen series):
- The celebrated Omen score was, naturally, absent from this movie but not only was it absent, it was replaced with a generic track that was barely distinguishable... scratch that, it was indistinguishable... from every other cookie cutter modern horror movie out there. What was annoying is that the score wasn't even noticeably bad, like Omen IV for example, it was just so painfully standard. Of all the things to do differently in the movie, the score would've been at the bottom of the list, they chose to copy practically everything else but went with different music when the music was arguably the original's strongest point. It baffles me. Was this a creative decision or a rights issue? Eh, I don't even care.
- Every single death scene except Kate's was done worse.
The ambassador's death at the beginning of the movie fell utterly flat in every way. This is supposed to be an Omen movie, one thing the original series was famous for was its inventive or gruesome deaths, and they couldn't think of a scarier or more disturbing way to kill someone in a horror film? Even Omen III (despite its innumerable faults) had an ambassador die in a startlingly realistic gunshot suicide scene, complete with gruesome leg twitching which reminded me of the real life Budd Dwyer tape. In IV, a guy gets hit by a wrecking ball and another girl dies slowly and painfully from snake bites, in II a guy is chopped in half in a freak elevator incident. In this, a 2006 modern day horror movie... the guy gets blown up, and you don't even see anything, just the car exploding. Was this deliberately watered down? I don't know the movie's official rating so I'm just guessing, but I can't see why they'd do that otherwise. Not that it's excusable, the fault would merely be passed to the studio rather than the director.
The nanny death scene was copied almost shot for shot, except the actress was awful and didn't deliver the line in a creepy way. Plus, it looks like the director literally went out of his way to show the noose in advance which completely ruins the surprise for first time viewers, there's a wide shot of where she is, with the noose, and then a closer shot where she's holding it high above her head. In the original it's a closer shot and you don't see the noose fast enough (it almost looks like part of her blouse or a choker if you're not watching closely) before she jumps and then the shock comes. She also swings backwards and smashes through the window for added impact, while in this version she swings backwards and... thuds against the wall gently before her shoe falls off. Also, I could be wrong because my memory of the specifics is a little sketchy, but I seem to recall the reaction to the suicide being more overdone this time... ? I'm sure I remember what seemed to be multiple grown adults along with their children screaming and running around much more as though they were under attack from terrorists, a complete contrast to the much more effective and realistic reaction in the original where there's a few muffled screams and then everyone just sort of stares in horror.
The effects involved in the priest's death were better, but the buildup was worse and the direction was inferior. Instead of the original's more subtle use of lighting and colour, which made the meeting between Thorn and the priest seem less of a foreshadowing for an inevitable death scene, before the storm then rolled in on what appeared to be an otherwise normal day which made it more eerie, it was replaced with pouring rain and dark shadows before anything even happens. In the first, as he walks away the scene could've just as easily ended and you wouldn't have expected anything, but in the remake even as a newcomer who'd never seen the original you'd be anticipating a gruesome demise. As for the late Pete Postlethwaite who is an otherwise competent actor in most of his movies, his performance in this seemed forced and yet his lines were somehow delivered with far less power and emphasis despite the fact that his character's eternal salvation is supposed to depend on convincing Thorn. I believed the priest's struggle in the first film, he truly looked tormented and desperate and his acting reflected that, Pete's version however was strangely bereft of emotion as though he was reading from cue cards half the time.
The photographer's death was unintentionally hilarious. One of the most effective parts of the first movie was when he actually sees what's coming, and has an expression of simultaneous realization and terror for a millisecond right before his head spinning decapitation, in this he just sort of stands up and then his head is casually sliced from behind without him ever knowing; right before his headless body comically flops backwards down the stairs like some morbid Looney Tunes sketch. Peck's reaction was also much more believable, he turns away while squeezing his eyes shut and rakes at his head as though trying to pry out the memory of what he's seen, while Schreiber instead briefly holds his mouth to stop an actual emotion coming out and his weak acting is then compensated for by a bizarre and gimmicky shaky cam effect. Horrible.
Baylock was amusingly disposed of rather quickly in this film, she basically jumps on Thorn's back, he struggles ever so briefly, flings her off and then kicks her in the face. After he drags Damien with little effort to the car, she appears again with what appeared to be a sledgehammer, and if you can get past the image of an old granny in a nightie swinging a sledgehammer into a car window you're then treated with another comical effect when Liev runs her over at full speed and she flies into the air before landing in the driveway. I seriously had to stifle laughter, it's been a while since a horror movie has done that to me. In the original Baylock is much more of a challenge for the wounded and middle-aged Gregory Peck, and the final image of her dying as she tries to pull out the ice pick (at least I think it was an ice pick) only for the handle to come loose, was haunting.
As for the death of Thorn himself, well... what's to say about it? Aside from reciting the Lord's prayer and Liev showing slightly more emotion than Peck did in the final moment, there's really not that much difference from the original, completely uninspired.
There are so many problems in the movie that if I were to detail them all I'd be here for even longer, everything from the photographer talking about how every inch of wall space in the priest's den being covered in bible pages despite there being several blatantly visible spaces of wall in multiple shots (unlike the original where the walls really were neatly and meticulously covered), to the half-assed dog attack scene in the cemetery that somehow managed to be less heart pounding than the original, to the brief but desperate dream sequences that tried so hard to be scary and shocking but failed, to the restrained or forced performances, to the damn near line-by-line copy of the script, to Damien himself whose actor didn't fit the part well at all, it just goes on and on.
If I had to say one good thing about the film, just one, I'd say that Kate's death scene and Liev's reaction was done so well it almost seemed like a different director had stepped in for those moments. Baylock was menacing as she crooned to Kate while murdering her, and Stiles did an excellent job of making me sympathize with her character in such a helpless state while she panicked and tried to scream. It was filmed so well it was actually disturbing, and it provided more closure as to how Baylock was able to get in to successfully dispatch Kate as Damien stared down the guard outside. If they'd included more stuff like that, this film might've actually been engaging, but everything else was so pointless it almost made me angry. I watched a featurette on the DVD where the director was whining about everything, to everyone, and it seemed like he just had little to no control over his crew. At one point he even blames the preposterous "Omen curse" for everything going wrong on the set, then later wishes he could be "good at something like painting" while complaining about unemployment (something he should get familiar with if you ask me), when judging by his stellar lineup of masterpieces like Max Payne and the most recent and worst Die Hard film, something tells me the curse was nothing more than lack of talent in his case.
Someone please offer me an explanation other than money as to why this was made, I really wanna know how else they pitched it. Not since Psycho has there been a worse remake, I'm amazed this managed to get an IMDb rating above 5. Apologies for the length of my post.
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."