Post by Bartwald on Dec 31, 2005 10:05:11 GMT -5
DAMIEN: OMEN II (1978)
DIRECTOR: Don Taylor
CAST: William Holden, Lee Grant, Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Lance Henriksen, Robert Foxworth
GRADE: 6/10
After the first Omen you could have doubts whether the story should be continued at the risk of diluting the original movie’s thrills and the ‘That’s a devil’s son!’ idea. But fortunately the sequel jumpstarts with a scene that lets you lock up all the initial doubts: a frantic ride through some ancient-looking city which is at the same time a link to the first Omen (a returning character in the jeep) and, on the other hand, gives the sequel unique feel from the very start. A good buried-alive scene follows and eventually you’re already prepared to watch an enjoyable sequel for a change.
Then Damien himself appears: taller, leaner, paler, his figure flickering as it’s in the background of bonfire flames; a chilling shot! After that we’ll have to listen to some explanations of what the future holds for the teenage Damien and his stepbrother (both going to a Military Academy, soon), of how he joined his new family (after the Gregory Peck character’s death he was taken home by his brother) and, most importantly, of who’s got doubts about Damien being ‘just a boy’ (as is easy to imagine, the person who expresses such doubts dies early on). So far, so good: just one person dead, all looks natural – heart attack. But at the Academy some people start pissing Damien off, some start spying on him, some just sense ‘something unusual’ about him. In consequence, more increasingly inventive deaths are given to us. Those deaths, by the way: only now, watching Omen II for the first time ever, have I realised that it must have been the main inspiration for the guys who made the Final Destination movies! The elevator death especially oozes the same tension as all the waiting-for-demise set pieces from the Destinations – you know the character is supposed to be offed now, the score (you’re good, you, Jerry Goldsmith!) makes your predictions even stronger but you DON’T know what the hell will that be in the end. Guy in an elevator, right? Surely he’s going to go down fast and crash his guts to the floor, providing us with a gore-splash scene? But no – it doesn’t happen. SOMETHING is going on, no doubt something damn bad, but that we don’t know the exact finale of it all only doubles the suspense and prepares us to pronounce the sympathetic ‘Fuck!’ when the painful death is finally shown. Same with the beheading scene in the original Omen – the score, the editing and your intuition must have told you that the guy won’t be seen alive for long, but wasn’t the final effect a bloody surprise? The elevator situation in Damien easily matches the flying head situation, you can trust me on that.
But of course it’s not all good in Damien. Some bland moments do lurk in the middle part of the movie and sometimes you wonder how the screenwriters could think of such an unthrilling setting for some scenes in their story (why the Academy? I, for one, didn’t feel it was a justified choice; or, even worse, why the goddamn factory?! – the academy boys visiting it is definitely the weakest portion of the movie ‘cause first of all - the devils and factories somehow don’t gel, and secondly – nothing really interesting or scary happens there, either, if you ask my opinion. Casting this particular boy (and with this particular haircut) in the role of Damien may seem questionable, too, as he’s definitely no competitor for the first part’s devilish kiddo. But he convincingly pushes his way through all the scenes and finally you start accepting the guy – especially after the moving part when he’s checking for the 666 mark on his head, this being one of the most emotional scenes in the movie showing Damien finally realising he’s no ordinary schoolboy; you got to pat the screenwriter on the back here as he didn’t decide to follow finding the three sixes with ‘Damien smiles viciously’ but with a more complex idea of him being torn between desire of belonging to the human world and his true hellish nature.
Alright, then – so they had to change the actor playing Damien and though the new one is not as good as the original one, he ain’t half bad, either. At the very least – the boy can act. But two more changes go for Damien’s guardians: an uptight maid and a rottweiler in The Omen versus Lance Henriksen and a crow here. Who do you think wins the battle? Well, although I like Lance a lot, the maid beats him to death as he doesn’t have so much to do here, being a rather ambiguous figure that adds to the viewer’s uncertainty about the people surrounding Damien. But the crow... to make it even between the two parts, the crow pecks the rottweiler to bloody pieces!; while the dog didn’t really cause so much damage in the first movie and was stupid enough to get itself locked in the cellar when Damien most needed it, the sequel’s bird is a real pisser – it can either scare you to death (if you’re old enough or of weak heart) or mess up your hairdo real bad and then eat out your eyeballs (if you’re a chick). So, even if we were harsh enough to conclude that it does nothing to healthy men in their prime, the crow’s still a killing machine and nobody should be disappointed with it taking the dog’s part in the second movie.
However, if you forced me to keep on comparing the two movies, the original Omen still wins, crowless or not. It’s just that in the first film the story was going forward in a much smoother manner and when it reached its conclusion at least half of the viewers must have screamed out a loud unanimous ‘Shit no!’ The sequel has an inspired start and several other inspired moments that make it a distinguished horror movie, but it also has those parts where you can’t help but switch to thinking about your bills to pay or whatever else that bothers you, and the ending is no ‘Shit no!’, either.
I like the DVD commentary on this one – it’s very sincere, the producer has no problem telling you what he hates about the movie (‘That awful red dress... I told Mike I don’t want a red dress in my movie – cause it always stands out like a sore thumb – and what did he do? He made sure to put a girl in this awful red dress in my movie!’) and it’s also informative to the ‘You won’t find it on imdb’-point. I would never know that the first director of this movie – fired, among other things, because of the red dress – was Mike Hodges. What’s more, he directed some of my favourite scenes here – Damien seen through the flame being one of them (we also get to know that another precious scene, the blood and guts in the elevator, was the producer’s own idea). The commentary tries also to clear up all the controversy of sequelising The Omen – the producer says that it was supposed to be a trilogy from the very start and that the only reason he didn’t get Richard Donner, the original director, to take care of the sequel was that he was already busy working on some obscure movie about a blue-tighted man, starring Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman. Also, you can forgive the guy for not remembering certain names as long as he’s able to make you smile with some anecdotes – like the one about an actor falling out of the Jeep in the movie’s opening scene. Sometimes he may be trying to fool you, as well – for instance when he’s saying that in the death-under-the-ice scene the actor really was swimming under the ice – but that only makes the whole thing more enjoyable.
DIRECTOR: Don Taylor
CAST: William Holden, Lee Grant, Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Lance Henriksen, Robert Foxworth
GRADE: 6/10
After the first Omen you could have doubts whether the story should be continued at the risk of diluting the original movie’s thrills and the ‘That’s a devil’s son!’ idea. But fortunately the sequel jumpstarts with a scene that lets you lock up all the initial doubts: a frantic ride through some ancient-looking city which is at the same time a link to the first Omen (a returning character in the jeep) and, on the other hand, gives the sequel unique feel from the very start. A good buried-alive scene follows and eventually you’re already prepared to watch an enjoyable sequel for a change.
Then Damien himself appears: taller, leaner, paler, his figure flickering as it’s in the background of bonfire flames; a chilling shot! After that we’ll have to listen to some explanations of what the future holds for the teenage Damien and his stepbrother (both going to a Military Academy, soon), of how he joined his new family (after the Gregory Peck character’s death he was taken home by his brother) and, most importantly, of who’s got doubts about Damien being ‘just a boy’ (as is easy to imagine, the person who expresses such doubts dies early on). So far, so good: just one person dead, all looks natural – heart attack. But at the Academy some people start pissing Damien off, some start spying on him, some just sense ‘something unusual’ about him. In consequence, more increasingly inventive deaths are given to us. Those deaths, by the way: only now, watching Omen II for the first time ever, have I realised that it must have been the main inspiration for the guys who made the Final Destination movies! The elevator death especially oozes the same tension as all the waiting-for-demise set pieces from the Destinations – you know the character is supposed to be offed now, the score (you’re good, you, Jerry Goldsmith!) makes your predictions even stronger but you DON’T know what the hell will that be in the end. Guy in an elevator, right? Surely he’s going to go down fast and crash his guts to the floor, providing us with a gore-splash scene? But no – it doesn’t happen. SOMETHING is going on, no doubt something damn bad, but that we don’t know the exact finale of it all only doubles the suspense and prepares us to pronounce the sympathetic ‘Fuck!’ when the painful death is finally shown. Same with the beheading scene in the original Omen – the score, the editing and your intuition must have told you that the guy won’t be seen alive for long, but wasn’t the final effect a bloody surprise? The elevator situation in Damien easily matches the flying head situation, you can trust me on that.
But of course it’s not all good in Damien. Some bland moments do lurk in the middle part of the movie and sometimes you wonder how the screenwriters could think of such an unthrilling setting for some scenes in their story (why the Academy? I, for one, didn’t feel it was a justified choice; or, even worse, why the goddamn factory?! – the academy boys visiting it is definitely the weakest portion of the movie ‘cause first of all - the devils and factories somehow don’t gel, and secondly – nothing really interesting or scary happens there, either, if you ask my opinion. Casting this particular boy (and with this particular haircut) in the role of Damien may seem questionable, too, as he’s definitely no competitor for the first part’s devilish kiddo. But he convincingly pushes his way through all the scenes and finally you start accepting the guy – especially after the moving part when he’s checking for the 666 mark on his head, this being one of the most emotional scenes in the movie showing Damien finally realising he’s no ordinary schoolboy; you got to pat the screenwriter on the back here as he didn’t decide to follow finding the three sixes with ‘Damien smiles viciously’ but with a more complex idea of him being torn between desire of belonging to the human world and his true hellish nature.
Alright, then – so they had to change the actor playing Damien and though the new one is not as good as the original one, he ain’t half bad, either. At the very least – the boy can act. But two more changes go for Damien’s guardians: an uptight maid and a rottweiler in The Omen versus Lance Henriksen and a crow here. Who do you think wins the battle? Well, although I like Lance a lot, the maid beats him to death as he doesn’t have so much to do here, being a rather ambiguous figure that adds to the viewer’s uncertainty about the people surrounding Damien. But the crow... to make it even between the two parts, the crow pecks the rottweiler to bloody pieces!; while the dog didn’t really cause so much damage in the first movie and was stupid enough to get itself locked in the cellar when Damien most needed it, the sequel’s bird is a real pisser – it can either scare you to death (if you’re old enough or of weak heart) or mess up your hairdo real bad and then eat out your eyeballs (if you’re a chick). So, even if we were harsh enough to conclude that it does nothing to healthy men in their prime, the crow’s still a killing machine and nobody should be disappointed with it taking the dog’s part in the second movie.
However, if you forced me to keep on comparing the two movies, the original Omen still wins, crowless or not. It’s just that in the first film the story was going forward in a much smoother manner and when it reached its conclusion at least half of the viewers must have screamed out a loud unanimous ‘Shit no!’ The sequel has an inspired start and several other inspired moments that make it a distinguished horror movie, but it also has those parts where you can’t help but switch to thinking about your bills to pay or whatever else that bothers you, and the ending is no ‘Shit no!’, either.
I like the DVD commentary on this one – it’s very sincere, the producer has no problem telling you what he hates about the movie (‘That awful red dress... I told Mike I don’t want a red dress in my movie – cause it always stands out like a sore thumb – and what did he do? He made sure to put a girl in this awful red dress in my movie!’) and it’s also informative to the ‘You won’t find it on imdb’-point. I would never know that the first director of this movie – fired, among other things, because of the red dress – was Mike Hodges. What’s more, he directed some of my favourite scenes here – Damien seen through the flame being one of them (we also get to know that another precious scene, the blood and guts in the elevator, was the producer’s own idea). The commentary tries also to clear up all the controversy of sequelising The Omen – the producer says that it was supposed to be a trilogy from the very start and that the only reason he didn’t get Richard Donner, the original director, to take care of the sequel was that he was already busy working on some obscure movie about a blue-tighted man, starring Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman. Also, you can forgive the guy for not remembering certain names as long as he’s able to make you smile with some anecdotes – like the one about an actor falling out of the Jeep in the movie’s opening scene. Sometimes he may be trying to fool you, as well – for instance when he’s saying that in the death-under-the-ice scene the actor really was swimming under the ice – but that only makes the whole thing more enjoyable.