Harefooted Halloween: Damien: Omen II

What I Liked: Jonathan Scott-Taylor who plays tween aged Damien does a damn good job.  He puts on such an air of smugness you wanna strangle him.  His bratty whinny assholic disposition is perfect for the antichrist at this stage in the process because he hasn’t learned yet that charm is an important and potent ingredient to getting supporters on your side.  Scott-Taylor dances on what must’ve been a hard line to walk.  He’s trying to understand who he really is, how to deal with being pure evil but he also genuinely loves his aunt, uncle and cousin who raised him since age five so he’s actually a tirade of emotion and not devoid of it.  That was a nice decision.  Plus since he’s been living in the states since the events of the previous film he has a half British half American accent.  A good attention to detail that I wasn’t expecting.

What I Didn’t Like: There isn’t any mystery for us to solve this time.  It’s about Damien’s Uncle Richard (William Holden (The Bridge on the River Kwai)), brother of Gregory Peck’s character from the original, and others around him slowly discovering who this kid really is.  But we, the audience, know he’s the devil or the devil’s son or whatever so it isn’t that much fun for us.  The plot becomes mostly concerned with Damien and his henchmen (yes, multiple this round) bumping off folks who either discover the secret or come close to discovering it.  That’s ok but not too thrilling.

Damien has flat out supernatural abilities now similar to Carrie where he can kill people with his mind.  He also has strange invisible demonic forces and a raven to keep his path clear so he can continue on his merry way unobstructed.  This results in some Final Destination type deaths.  They’re not as fuckin’ ridiculous and elaborate as in those films but they’re in the same spirit.  You could chalk up everything that happens in the first picture to coincidence.  That movie heavily implies it’s not but they at least leave some room for doubt.  Here there’s no question.  When Damien causes a fireball to shoot out of nowhere or a train lever to switch into gear to start rolling down the tracks ambiguity is out the window.  That’s a sillier route to take.

This picture has the same issue as the first in that Damien and his cohorts needlessly attract attention to themselves by stacking up corpses.  Anyone that gets in their way boom, they’re dead.  Again, this tactic almost thwarts their plans for the apocalypse.  If they played it cooler and let more shit slide then Damien would come off like less of a weirdo and they’d have smoother sailing.

Unfortunately there’s no satisfying ending.  The build is soft where Uncle Richard takes a long time to realize what’s happening around him and then suddenly leaps to wanting to murder Damien.  So when it feels like things are finally starting to ramp up the movie just sorta stops.  The end point is logical on paper and they do throw in one final twist but it isn’t very impactful in practice.

Overall Impressions: This is basically a worse version of the original.  I mean it’s fine and watchable even if it is kinda sloppy in general.  There’s nothing about it that annoys me or insults me but at the same time there isn’t anything that excites me either.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the worst aspect of this entry is that it probably isn’t necessary.  We have two more sequels to explore in the series (along with the remake) and doing a pitstop to check in on Damien at age twelve seems redundant.  Let’s skip to him as an adult when he has much more autonomy over his life and decisions.  How will he navigate society with his diabolical powers and what path will he take to bring about the end of the world?  I would rather see that than an obnoxious kid showing up his teacher in history class by magically being able to rapid fire name any date in history that anything happened.  Funny scene but not exactly foreboding for your antichrist movie.