The Omen
(2006/DVD-Video)
Picture: C+ Sound: B- Extras: C- Film: D
There is
a great piece in Robin Wood’s book Hollywood:
From Vietnam To Reagan… And Beyond (reviewed elsewhere on this site) where
he uses two original Horror classics to define two types of Horror film. Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is the artistic, gritty B-movie,
while Richard Donner’s The Omen
(1976) is used as the big Hollywood studio A-production. In the last few years, both films have been
remade. While Marcus Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake had a
few good moments, unknown John Moore does an awful demolition of The Omen (2006) that was going to be
titled The Omen 666 originally.
The
reason they abandoned it is so people would not mistake it for a
straight-to-DVD piece of garbage. Now,
they’ll have to see the remake to find out just how deeply that is the
case. Like Showgirls, every single decision that they could have made wrong,
they make in the worst possible way. First,
they began with Liev Schreiber, who was already horrible in Jonathan Demme’s
disembowment of another classic, The
Manchurian Candidate (2004, reviewed on HD-DVD elsewhere on this site) and
let him take Gregory peck’s role. Wasn’t
ruining a Laurence Harvey role enough?
Then they
got Julia Stiles to take the Lee Remick role, for which Miss Stiles sleepwalks
through in what is simply the worst performance of her career. Fresh from his wasted work in the awful Basic Instinct 2 (2006, but who cares
which one he finished first) is David Thewlis as the doomed photographer, while
Michael Gambon is also here and many of their scenes look like outtakes. Mia Farrow is cast as Mrs. Baylock in an
obvious choice, but Moore and his producers are clueless as to how to make that
pay off and the climax of her work is a disaster. That she is underused is another crime.
Only Pete
Postlewaite as the knowing Father Brennan has any idea of what to do, what film
he is in and outacts everyone else combined.
This includes Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick as Damien, who is miscast, has
glowing blue eyes for no good reason and is never convincing to the point that
though we blame Moore 100% for his bad performance, he still could get a Razzie
or Stinker for Worst Actor and be the youngest in the history of the award to
do so. They could have used a mannequin.
Now,
there was the stupid idea swiped from Gus Van Sant’s catastrophic and now
little-discussed remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s remake of Psycho that it was somehow so amazing that it was some kind of shot
by shot remake of the original. That was
a myth and is one repeated here. The
only reason that is being said is that the producers decided not to pay anyone
for a rewrite, abuse original writer David Seltzer’s name despite bastardizing
his work. Yet people get suckered by
such lies, but I guess “based on a true story” is not making the money it used
to.
Overall,
this is one of the worst films of the year and worst, most unnecessary remakes
of all time (and it has plenty of competition for that title) and is just an
extremely ill-advised cash-in so heartless that it even delivers the ultimate
insult early: the trivialization of the
9/11 attacks by showing the planes hit The World Trade Center Towers and
relating it to the stupidity of this film.
How shameless can you get?
If that
was not bad enough, the film also looks bad, as shot by cinematographer
Jonathan Sela, who with bad editor Dan Zimmerman, are doing something more akin
to a bad Music Video than a thriller here.
The dumbest decisions possible are made with recolorizing the film via
its DI (Digital Internegative) and it degrades depth and detail to an
embarrassing extent. Any visual scares
are instantly cleaned from each frame and along with the already bad directing,
make many “serious” scenes a laughing stock.
It looks like a bad 1980s TV movie.
As for Sela, this guy shot Soul
Plane, so why was he hired? Why did
he go for the same color schemes?
The Dolby
Digital 5.1 mix is noting very impressive and is actually no match for the
character of the original monophonic soundtrack of the 1976 film, itself good
enough to be upgraded to 5.1 itself by Fox.
Surrounds in this new version are phony and never naturalistic, dialogue
is badly delivered and only so well recorded, then there is the awful music
score by Marco Beltrami that is his worst work (and he has done a few good
scores) while they still use Jerry Goldsmith’s classic theme song. Why not just use Goldsmith’s whole
score? It too is a classic that just
about any composer would have been doomed in trying to replace, but I guess the
makers knew their film could not even live up to Goldsmith’s score, so that is
saved from desecration.
Extras
include a bizarre audio commentary track by director John Moore, Producer Glenn
Williamson & Editor Dan Zimmerman, the unimpressive "Revelation
666" featurette, unrated extended sequences, unrated alternate ending, the
goofy Omenisms, Abbey Road recording sessions and trailers. Well, at least the trailers were watchable.
Now you
might think I am being harsh on the remake because I was a huge fan of the
original. Though I liked it, I tend to
like Damien: Omen 2 even more, but
that’s another essay. But fellow critic
Chuck O’Leary does think the original is a classic and I agree with that. His review can be found at:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3829/The+Omen+(2006/Theatrical+Film+Review)
As for
this version, Fox intends to make it one of their first Blu-ray releases, which
we look forward to seeing simply to see what weird things high definition does
to the picture. The original deserves
the same treatment and will likely get it.
If you want to see a great film, check out the original in its new
special edition at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3926/The+Omen+(1976)+-+Collector's+Edition+(2+DVD+Set)
- Nicholas Sheffo
