Harefooted Halloween: Omen IV: The Awakening

What I Liked: Aiyee let’s skip to the next section.

What I Didn’t Like: While the script isn’t good really a bigger problem is this thing just isn’t directed well.  Dominique Othenin-Girard of Halloween 5 fame was initially hired to helm but quit half way through and was replaced by Jorge Montesi of Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal fame (that’s a very fun bad movie by the way, you should check it out).  And it’s not that you can clearly tell two different people put this together (although sometimes you do get that sense), it’s that the whole thing feels weird.  For example there are many fades into and out of black that make for awkward scene transitions.  I know this was a made for TV movie but there still isn’t a good flow to the material.  The score has this bizarre cartoony edge with xylophone in particular being clumsily employed.  Not only that but they put music in places that don’t need it.  And one of the other big issues is they directed Asia Vieira poorly who plays Satan’s eight year old daughter.  She always either has a slight frown or a slight smile and as a result she looks so damn strange and not in a good way.  In some scenes she acts fine and in others she overacts and I gotta believe all this is the directors giving incoherent guidance to this little girl.  Plus the costume choices are questionable.  Like look at these ugly ass outfits they dress her in.

Overall Impressions: Yea, it’s definitely cheap and not particularly well shot or edited or scored or acted but what bothers me the most is they made the same fuckin’ movie for a third time.  This is more or less parts 1 and 2 except the demon child is a girl instead of a boy and the parent who does all the detective work is the mother instead of the father/uncle.

They leave no doubt that this is a direct sequel to part 3 but I guess it was a long enough gap in between films (ten years) that they went for a reboot-quel.  That doesn’t make the movie any less frustrating though because they still had an opportunity to try to find a different angle to the story and didn’t take it.  They don’t even pretend that all the terrible shit that happens could be a coincidence of bad luck.  No, this girl is the devil and she or some supernatural force helps her destroy any enemy that comes close to figuring out the truth.  Similar to the other films these evil powers could benefit from being more subtle as opposed to I dunno, squashing a dude with a swinging wrecking ball.  That’s a touch heavy handed if you ask me.  Does every adversary have to be murdered?  What if they went catatonic or were maimed in some way?  That doesn’t cut it?

There’s also the extremely abrupt ending like in part 2.  A build up of tension is gathered slowly and weakly for almost the entire run with the mother putting the bits together.  Then in the last five minutes there’s a sudden flurry of action (that you wish was spread more throughout) and then the credits roll.

So part 4 here is at the bottom of the ranks in the series.  From a technical standpoint it’s a little interesting because the flaws are kind of obvious so I was sort of engaged in picking out all the confounding terrible decisions.  Other than that it’s the same shit but done worse-er (pretty sure not a word) than before.