THE DUKE ON
THE OMEN 2006
THE OMEN 2006
The Devil (centre)-"Very Evil"
And lo, it was written;
“On the 6th day of the 6th month of the 6th year there shall bound
from out the guts of the ocean a beast afire with abomination and
hatred and cynicism and dementia, and many shall gaze upon it, and
will say Oh fuck aye, sure I know it the very best, and woe, for
they know not the beast, but think they do, on account of it looks
a bit familiar and truth be told they heard good things about it
from folks who know a thing or two about the in’s and out’s of
beast appraisal.
They will dine with the beast, for 110 minutes, and yet their
bellies will be famished and their ears will throb with nausea.
There will be great wailing and gnashing and laughing and mocking
and lamenting about how the thing about Tim Allen is a dog is on
couple doors away.
Worry none, though. By the 7th of the 6th of the 6th you’ll have
forgotten the fuck all about it.”
Woe to you, oh Earth and Sea.
Couple nights past, lain on a makeshift bed in the middle o’ a
living room somewheres to the north of the University buildings,
what happens is a fella gets to asking the beautiful lass all
holding his hand about what her favourite motion picture of all
ever might be?
The beautiful lass, the Lady-Friend, y’unnerstann, Ms Gillian, she
ponders the question a minute, lets it slide back and forth and
under and over her tongue, aye, and then a cautious word or two all
spun from yonder musing; “Well, it could be The Last Unicorn, but
it could just as easily be The Exorcist.”
The Exorcist. What scholars will note in the footnotes to the 24th
anniversary edition of this incisive critique is that yes, The
Exorcist is probably my third favourite Devil Doing Wacky Shit
flick of all ever, and for sure, I tell her this, and a wee kiss on
account of why not, it’s well past the 5am and there’s all sortsa L
words floating about the airways.
“So what’s the top two” she asks, far side o’ yonder lip-press.
What I tell her is that number one is Damiano Damiani’s 1982
masterpiece Amityville II – The Possession, about The Devil bounds
into the body of a young fella all heroin chic and jaded stare and
full of the filth for his sister. A deranged tapestry o’ shotgun
wounds all sprayin the head-muck cross the walls, flies stacked
floor to ceiling in rooms all green wi’ the sickness, incestuous
grotesqueries and speed-crazed cameras and rib-cage swelling and
skull-hole splitting.
A solitary notch ‘neath The Possession is Richard Donner’s 1976
The Omen.
Whereas Damiani’s take on the Wacky Shit The Devil Done Did is all
Evil Dead gymnastics and grindhouse sludge, Donner went ahead and
applied the mechanics o’ the gothic melodrama to the material, like
if Douglas Sirk had found The Devil Himself bleeding out Rock
Hudson’s eyeballs back in the day and flung the wily rascal in the
direction of Third Man-era Carol Reed.
The Omen has most everything a Devil Doing Wacky Shit flick needs,
y’unnerstann, being all suffocating atmosphere and half-mad priests
gabbling eschatological and eerie photographs and demonic choirs
and the son of The Very Fucking Devil staring blankly into the lens
like Norman Bates at the fag-end o’ Psycho.
An incredible piece o’ work, it is.
What Beautiful Ms Gillian announces is “It’s been years since I’ve
seen it. Wouldn’t mind seeing it again, in fact.”
Who knows why or for what reason, but next thing I know a buncha
demented shit long the lines of “The remake’s out on Tuesday, maybe
we should go?” is all tumbling up and out my throat-tubes.
It’ll be the sixth of the sixth of the sixth, I say. It’ll be all
the fun in the world. And the director seems like a nice fella,
knows a thing or two about calling himself a cunt in interviews, I
figure it’ll be worthwhile, all being told. And it’s The Omen, for
the love o’ the infant Christ. It’ll be great.
Ms Gillian, what she says is ok. What she says is we’ll do that
right there.
I’m sorry Ms Gillian. I’m all the sorry in the fucking world.
Few weeks ago, sat on the benches outside the chapel with Sir
Fleming, we’re watching a drunk fella stagger past the post office,
pishing all over the street as he wanders towards the car-park, a
big ol’ trail o’ bladder-mess stretching from the front door of the
Save The Children charity shop to the gnarled, grizzled filth-limb
hanging out the front of his jogging bottoms.
For a minute we say nothing, Sir Fleming and I, awed out our
kidneys as we are by the unspeakably tragic display, and then aye,
lighting a smoke, I say “So this Omen then. What about that?”
“Fuck your Omen” quoth Sir Fleming, “John Moore can pick the shite
from out my arse-hair he thinks I’m set for giving anything other
than Not One Fuck with regards that rancid bastard of a picture
he's weaving.”
Sir Fleming, far as he sees it The Omen 2006 is just the latest
musket-round in an epic battle twixt Hollywood and Our Very Souls.
“It might be fun” I say. “It might even be good. It’s The Omen in
the present day, by the Holy Holes O' Mary, think of the
possibilities! The Antichrist born into a world mentalised in the
knob-guts by The Fundamentalism and the crazed zealots and the AK-
chugging God-head delirium! It’s a flick about how the biggest
threat to Christ’s kingdom could’ve been averted if only there’d
been an abortion! How will the pro-life folks react to that? A
bollock-load o’ thought-provoking controversy, that’s what could
result, Sir Fleming.”
“It’ll be wank!” he spits.
“Maybe not. You don’t know for sure.”
I’m sorry Sir Fleming. I’m all the sorry in the fucking world.
Walking into the cinema, stepping over a couple teenagers fell
asleep on the front steps on account of the bellyfulls o’ Buckfast
all boiling in the guts, what I’m saying to Beautiful Ms Gillian is
how maybe I’ll write a review of this Omen business. It’s been a
while since I did one, a proper review like what you’d find falling
out the fingers of your Ebert’s or Knowleses or Bradshaw’s. A big
ol’ screed says all about there’s a film about X and what I think
is this and also here’s some trivia done plundered from the IMDB
and tossed to the screen ‘thout a hint of an acknowledgement.
Beautiful Ms Gillian, she thinks it’s a swell idea, just the very
thing for to cure the semi-funk all hung like moss on the Scribble-
Pipes.
Recently, see, I been getting all sortsa frustrated with the words
all spilling o’er the keyboard. Fella finds himself hollering blind
at half-finished articles and half-started reviews. Look at you
there, he says, you deplorable bastards, you sense-starved slugs
all slitherin’ cross the white. Self-indulgent pretentious pish, he
barks, and nary a joke to be chuckled at.
An Incisive Critique Of The Omen 2006. If that doesn’t get the
digits diggin then fuck alone knows what will.
Walking into Screen 1, we pass a poster for The Da Vinci Code.
“Look there”, says I, “We should go see that. It’ll be fucking
awful, I bet. Probably, I would imagine, the worst film of the
year, and certainly the worst that involves any kind of religious
banter and freaky madmen all scourged wi’ knife-wielding mania.”
What could be worse, I done chuckled. I’m willing to bet nothing
could be worse, is what could be worse.
I’m sorry The Da Vinci Code. I’m all the sorry in the fucking world.
Turns out, see, that John Moore’s 2006 remake of yonder number
about the “He’s my son!” and the “No! He’s the very bastard devil!”
and the “No! He’s my son!” and the “No!” and so on, turns out that
it is, I dare say, the worst film I’ve seen in a decade, certainly
the very worst flick about The Devil Does Wacky Shit anyone could
ever for a second even think about thinking about conceiving of.
It’s worse than Paul Schrader’s Exorcist Dominion, which at least
had a cool bald fella hissin’ and clawin’ his way through the final
act. It’s worse than Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, which at
least had Johnny Depp. It’s worse than Alan Parker’s Angel Heart,
which at least looked beautiful. It’s worse even, would you
believe, than Jorge Montesi and Dominique Othenin-Girard’s The Omen
IV - The Awakening, which, like The Omen 2006, was stupid and
boring and sloppy and ugly, but at least had the decency to be
hilarious.
The Omen 2006 is abominable. A soulless, pointless, charmless,
irrelevant nothing reeking like a sack-fulla month-old semen
festering in the lash o’ the desert sun.
Any hope of an update comparable to, say, Philip Kaufman’s version
of Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, a remake which
totally surpassed the original and truly reflected the culture it
addressed, any such fantastical notions will be lucky to make it
past the opening credits of Moore’s catastrophic wank-off.
Kaufman made sure that his film would mean something, would say
something to his audience whether they’d seen Siegel’s number or
not. Moore, on the other hand, has no interest in doing anything
other than replicating Donner’s every fart and hiccup scene-for-
scene and often shot-for-shot, minus the atmosphere and the
cinematic worth and the tension and the ambiguity and the sense of
apocalyptic dread.
To be fair, he does give some Final Destination-esque sheen to a
handful of killings and slaps a prodigiously inane prologue into
the first five minutes, a crushingly inept article concerning
various clerical types racing around the Vatican in a terrible fuss
relating to comets and prophecies and world events.
Oh, and he gets rid of the Jerry Goldsmith score. If you’re only
gonna throw out one element, best make it the one that got the
Oscar.
Other than these minor digressions, Moore’s film is nothing more
than a seventeenth-generation VHS copy of a camcorder bootleg of
The Omen. A Microsoft Paint rendition of a photograph of a
photograph of a photograph.
What I got to thinking half-way through the picture was something
along the lines of the following;
How the hell could anyone assume anyone would want to see this?
What possible motivation could there be for this carbon-copy
approach?
In the cold light o’ 4a.m, only two scenarios make any sense
whatsoever.
Scenario one involves some studio types realising that, since it
was obviously gonna happen anyway, they may as well remake The Omen
in time for the big 6/6/06 opening. Sadly, they seem to have
decided this on the afternoon of 6/5/06. The only way to get it
done in time is to film the original screenplay again. We can have
it done by the weekend, they cheer.
Scenario two involves a situation similar to that depicted in
Wolfgang Becker’s delightful Goodbye Lenin!, in which a young lad
races around the place trying to keep his mum from finding out that
the Berlin Wall has fallen, on account of she’s just out of a coma
and any such revelations will likely slap her upside the brains
with a million strands o’ torturous funk.
Perhaps John Moore was suffering from a similar condition, and
would surely be knee-deep in The Trauma if anyone should let slip
how, actually, there’s not really much point remaking The Omen in a
scene-for-scene fashion since, as we all know, everyone’s already
seen it. If they noted how maybe what they should do is Anything
The Fuck Else, that poor bastard Moore might never speak again.
In which case, I’m sorry John Moore. I’m all the sorry in the
fucking world.
The facts of the case, see, are that not only did the Berlin Wall
tumble to the wailing kerb-side, but also, chances are everyone
went home to watch The Omen right after.
Everyone, John. Everyone. Every man, woman and child born or unborn
has seen The Omen.
Even people who haven’t seen The Omen have seen The Omen. They know
intimately everything that anyone could possibly ever want to know
about what goes on when Gregory Peck finds out his adopted son was
sprayed out The Devil’s very ball-bag. They know who Damien is and
what he gets up to and how it all turns out and why those weird
glitches keep showing up in the photographs.
The people who have opted out of seeing it for whatever reason are
no more likely to watch it now just cause it’s got the fella out
Nip / Tuck and has images of 9/11 in the opening sequence.
For reasons known only to God and the Risen Redeemer, John Moore
never considers this for a second.
Neither does he bother worrying about how no newspaper in the
Western World, not even The Sun, would print, on the front page no
less, an image of a Priest hanging dead on account of the spire
through his neck and the face-fulla stained glass chards sticking
this way and that out the flesh.
It bothers him not a jot that most folks, upon hearing how “pages
from the bible cover every inch of these walls” would expect to see
pages from the bible covering every inch of those walls, and not a
handful of tattered sheets stuck here and there in loose clusters.
He doesn’t strain his fret-glands a notch regarding the possibility
that if indeed The Devil were to do some Wacky Shit like have a
child, and if said child was going to have to endure a lengthy
political career afore he got to do anything especially diabolical,
then maybe Lucifer might make sure that the child is smart enough
not to fuck up the whole plan by making scary “I’m Evil” faces
every time anyone walks within fourteen kilometres of the bugger.
“Listen here”, The Devil would probably have said, “The last thing
we want is folks knowing that you’re the son of The Very Fucking
Devil, so don’t be doing anything daft like staring up past your
eyebrows every opportunity or scowling all sinister at monkeys for
no reason.”
John Moore. He couldn’t give any less of a shit about that sorta
nonsense if he tried.
He just points and shoots and his film totters carelessly from A to
B to C in a manner reminds a fella of the drunken student who’ll
ask you if you’ve seen Scarface and then, upon receiving an
affirmative answer, proceeds to recite every bastard line over and
over for the next nine hours.
Leaving the cinema, I’m saying to Beautiful Ms Gillian about how
I'm sorry. I’m all the sorry in the fucking world.
If’n I’d taken you to a sewer for to watch a hundred vagrants toss
off into one another’s hair, I tell her, if I’d done that, it’d
still have been better than this, and chances are there’d have been
97% less wank on display.
What I tell her is I had no idea, I really did think it might be
good.
But no.
Not a frame passes in The Omen 2006 without some horrific
imbecility or other bounding out the screen for to spray liquid
arse-paste cross a fella’s very eyes. It’s obnoxious and insulting
and has the personality of a dead dog’s scrotum.
The score is horrendous. The performances are identifiable as such
only cause the folks "performing" are known to have acted a time or
two in the past, and probably that's what they're up to here,
although who the hell could really tell? The young lad playing
Damien is, in all likelihood, the worst child actor in the history
of both the medium of cinema and of pre-teen scowling.
Under no artistic or moral criteria is this anywhere near tolerable
or worthwhile or even slightly less obnoxious than a fella coughing
vodka over your shoes at a funeral, whilst telling you all about
the time he sucked off a Shetland pony.
Still, I did get to sit in the dark with Beautiful Ms Gillian for
two blessed hours, and if nothing else, The Omen 2006 will at least
keep the Anti-Christ at bay for a time. The fucker'll be so
embarrassed and ashamed after this it's likely it'll be another six
millennia afore he dares think about showing his stupid pouting
face in public.
The Omen 2006, then. What unspeakably rotten tripe.
Sorry John.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email or Sign The Mondo Guestbook
“On the 6th day of the 6th month of the 6th year there shall bound
from out the guts of the ocean a beast afire with abomination and
hatred and cynicism and dementia, and many shall gaze upon it, and
will say Oh fuck aye, sure I know it the very best, and woe, for
they know not the beast, but think they do, on account of it looks
a bit familiar and truth be told they heard good things about it
from folks who know a thing or two about the in’s and out’s of
beast appraisal.
They will dine with the beast, for 110 minutes, and yet their
bellies will be famished and their ears will throb with nausea.
There will be great wailing and gnashing and laughing and mocking
and lamenting about how the thing about Tim Allen is a dog is on
couple doors away.
Worry none, though. By the 7th of the 6th of the 6th you’ll have
forgotten the fuck all about it.”
Woe to you, oh Earth and Sea.
Couple nights past, lain on a makeshift bed in the middle o’ a
living room somewheres to the north of the University buildings,
what happens is a fella gets to asking the beautiful lass all
holding his hand about what her favourite motion picture of all
ever might be?
The beautiful lass, the Lady-Friend, y’unnerstann, Ms Gillian, she
ponders the question a minute, lets it slide back and forth and
under and over her tongue, aye, and then a cautious word or two all
spun from yonder musing; “Well, it could be The Last Unicorn, but
it could just as easily be The Exorcist.”
The Exorcist. What scholars will note in the footnotes to the 24th
anniversary edition of this incisive critique is that yes, The
Exorcist is probably my third favourite Devil Doing Wacky Shit
flick of all ever, and for sure, I tell her this, and a wee kiss on
account of why not, it’s well past the 5am and there’s all sortsa L
words floating about the airways.
“So what’s the top two” she asks, far side o’ yonder lip-press.
What I tell her is that number one is Damiano Damiani’s 1982
masterpiece Amityville II – The Possession, about The Devil bounds
into the body of a young fella all heroin chic and jaded stare and
full of the filth for his sister. A deranged tapestry o’ shotgun
wounds all sprayin the head-muck cross the walls, flies stacked
floor to ceiling in rooms all green wi’ the sickness, incestuous
grotesqueries and speed-crazed cameras and rib-cage swelling and
skull-hole splitting.
A solitary notch ‘neath The Possession is Richard Donner’s 1976
The Omen.
Whereas Damiani’s take on the Wacky Shit The Devil Done Did is all
Evil Dead gymnastics and grindhouse sludge, Donner went ahead and
applied the mechanics o’ the gothic melodrama to the material, like
if Douglas Sirk had found The Devil Himself bleeding out Rock
Hudson’s eyeballs back in the day and flung the wily rascal in the
direction of Third Man-era Carol Reed.
The Omen has most everything a Devil Doing Wacky Shit flick needs,
y’unnerstann, being all suffocating atmosphere and half-mad priests
gabbling eschatological and eerie photographs and demonic choirs
and the son of The Very Fucking Devil staring blankly into the lens
like Norman Bates at the fag-end o’ Psycho.
An incredible piece o’ work, it is.
What Beautiful Ms Gillian announces is “It’s been years since I’ve
seen it. Wouldn’t mind seeing it again, in fact.”
Who knows why or for what reason, but next thing I know a buncha
demented shit long the lines of “The remake’s out on Tuesday, maybe
we should go?” is all tumbling up and out my throat-tubes.
It’ll be the sixth of the sixth of the sixth, I say. It’ll be all
the fun in the world. And the director seems like a nice fella,
knows a thing or two about calling himself a cunt in interviews, I
figure it’ll be worthwhile, all being told. And it’s The Omen, for
the love o’ the infant Christ. It’ll be great.
Ms Gillian, what she says is ok. What she says is we’ll do that
right there.
I’m sorry Ms Gillian. I’m all the sorry in the fucking world.
Few weeks ago, sat on the benches outside the chapel with Sir
Fleming, we’re watching a drunk fella stagger past the post office,
pishing all over the street as he wanders towards the car-park, a
big ol’ trail o’ bladder-mess stretching from the front door of the
Save The Children charity shop to the gnarled, grizzled filth-limb
hanging out the front of his jogging bottoms.
For a minute we say nothing, Sir Fleming and I, awed out our
kidneys as we are by the unspeakably tragic display, and then aye,
lighting a smoke, I say “So this Omen then. What about that?”
“Fuck your Omen” quoth Sir Fleming, “John Moore can pick the shite
from out my arse-hair he thinks I’m set for giving anything other
than Not One Fuck with regards that rancid bastard of a picture
he's weaving.”
Sir Fleming, far as he sees it The Omen 2006 is just the latest
musket-round in an epic battle twixt Hollywood and Our Very Souls.
“It might be fun” I say. “It might even be good. It’s The Omen in
the present day, by the Holy Holes O' Mary, think of the
possibilities! The Antichrist born into a world mentalised in the
knob-guts by The Fundamentalism and the crazed zealots and the AK-
chugging God-head delirium! It’s a flick about how the biggest
threat to Christ’s kingdom could’ve been averted if only there’d
been an abortion! How will the pro-life folks react to that? A
bollock-load o’ thought-provoking controversy, that’s what could
result, Sir Fleming.”
“It’ll be wank!” he spits.
“Maybe not. You don’t know for sure.”
I’m sorry Sir Fleming. I’m all the sorry in the fucking world.
Walking into the cinema, stepping over a couple teenagers fell
asleep on the front steps on account of the bellyfulls o’ Buckfast
all boiling in the guts, what I’m saying to Beautiful Ms Gillian is
how maybe I’ll write a review of this Omen business. It’s been a
while since I did one, a proper review like what you’d find falling
out the fingers of your Ebert’s or Knowleses or Bradshaw’s. A big
ol’ screed says all about there’s a film about X and what I think
is this and also here’s some trivia done plundered from the IMDB
and tossed to the screen ‘thout a hint of an acknowledgement.
Beautiful Ms Gillian, she thinks it’s a swell idea, just the very
thing for to cure the semi-funk all hung like moss on the Scribble-
Pipes.
Recently, see, I been getting all sortsa frustrated with the words
all spilling o’er the keyboard. Fella finds himself hollering blind
at half-finished articles and half-started reviews. Look at you
there, he says, you deplorable bastards, you sense-starved slugs
all slitherin’ cross the white. Self-indulgent pretentious pish, he
barks, and nary a joke to be chuckled at.
An Incisive Critique Of The Omen 2006. If that doesn’t get the
digits diggin then fuck alone knows what will.
Walking into Screen 1, we pass a poster for The Da Vinci Code.
“Look there”, says I, “We should go see that. It’ll be fucking
awful, I bet. Probably, I would imagine, the worst film of the
year, and certainly the worst that involves any kind of religious
banter and freaky madmen all scourged wi’ knife-wielding mania.”
What could be worse, I done chuckled. I’m willing to bet nothing
could be worse, is what could be worse.
I’m sorry The Da Vinci Code. I’m all the sorry in the fucking world.
Turns out, see, that John Moore’s 2006 remake of yonder number
about the “He’s my son!” and the “No! He’s the very bastard devil!”
and the “No! He’s my son!” and the “No!” and so on, turns out that
it is, I dare say, the worst film I’ve seen in a decade, certainly
the very worst flick about The Devil Does Wacky Shit anyone could
ever for a second even think about thinking about conceiving of.
It’s worse than Paul Schrader’s Exorcist Dominion, which at least
had a cool bald fella hissin’ and clawin’ his way through the final
act. It’s worse than Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, which at
least had Johnny Depp. It’s worse than Alan Parker’s Angel Heart,
which at least looked beautiful. It’s worse even, would you
believe, than Jorge Montesi and Dominique Othenin-Girard’s The Omen
IV - The Awakening, which, like The Omen 2006, was stupid and
boring and sloppy and ugly, but at least had the decency to be
hilarious.
The Omen 2006 is abominable. A soulless, pointless, charmless,
irrelevant nothing reeking like a sack-fulla month-old semen
festering in the lash o’ the desert sun.
Any hope of an update comparable to, say, Philip Kaufman’s version
of Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, a remake which
totally surpassed the original and truly reflected the culture it
addressed, any such fantastical notions will be lucky to make it
past the opening credits of Moore’s catastrophic wank-off.
Kaufman made sure that his film would mean something, would say
something to his audience whether they’d seen Siegel’s number or
not. Moore, on the other hand, has no interest in doing anything
other than replicating Donner’s every fart and hiccup scene-for-
scene and often shot-for-shot, minus the atmosphere and the
cinematic worth and the tension and the ambiguity and the sense of
apocalyptic dread.
To be fair, he does give some Final Destination-esque sheen to a
handful of killings and slaps a prodigiously inane prologue into
the first five minutes, a crushingly inept article concerning
various clerical types racing around the Vatican in a terrible fuss
relating to comets and prophecies and world events.
Oh, and he gets rid of the Jerry Goldsmith score. If you’re only
gonna throw out one element, best make it the one that got the
Oscar.
Other than these minor digressions, Moore’s film is nothing more
than a seventeenth-generation VHS copy of a camcorder bootleg of
The Omen. A Microsoft Paint rendition of a photograph of a
photograph of a photograph.
What I got to thinking half-way through the picture was something
along the lines of the following;
How the hell could anyone assume anyone would want to see this?
What possible motivation could there be for this carbon-copy
approach?
In the cold light o’ 4a.m, only two scenarios make any sense
whatsoever.
Scenario one involves some studio types realising that, since it
was obviously gonna happen anyway, they may as well remake The Omen
in time for the big 6/6/06 opening. Sadly, they seem to have
decided this on the afternoon of 6/5/06. The only way to get it
done in time is to film the original screenplay again. We can have
it done by the weekend, they cheer.
Scenario two involves a situation similar to that depicted in
Wolfgang Becker’s delightful Goodbye Lenin!, in which a young lad
races around the place trying to keep his mum from finding out that
the Berlin Wall has fallen, on account of she’s just out of a coma
and any such revelations will likely slap her upside the brains
with a million strands o’ torturous funk.
Perhaps John Moore was suffering from a similar condition, and
would surely be knee-deep in The Trauma if anyone should let slip
how, actually, there’s not really much point remaking The Omen in a
scene-for-scene fashion since, as we all know, everyone’s already
seen it. If they noted how maybe what they should do is Anything
The Fuck Else, that poor bastard Moore might never speak again.
In which case, I’m sorry John Moore. I’m all the sorry in the
fucking world.
The facts of the case, see, are that not only did the Berlin Wall
tumble to the wailing kerb-side, but also, chances are everyone
went home to watch The Omen right after.
Everyone, John. Everyone. Every man, woman and child born or unborn
has seen The Omen.
Even people who haven’t seen The Omen have seen The Omen. They know
intimately everything that anyone could possibly ever want to know
about what goes on when Gregory Peck finds out his adopted son was
sprayed out The Devil’s very ball-bag. They know who Damien is and
what he gets up to and how it all turns out and why those weird
glitches keep showing up in the photographs.
The people who have opted out of seeing it for whatever reason are
no more likely to watch it now just cause it’s got the fella out
Nip / Tuck and has images of 9/11 in the opening sequence.
For reasons known only to God and the Risen Redeemer, John Moore
never considers this for a second.
Neither does he bother worrying about how no newspaper in the
Western World, not even The Sun, would print, on the front page no
less, an image of a Priest hanging dead on account of the spire
through his neck and the face-fulla stained glass chards sticking
this way and that out the flesh.
It bothers him not a jot that most folks, upon hearing how “pages
from the bible cover every inch of these walls” would expect to see
pages from the bible covering every inch of those walls, and not a
handful of tattered sheets stuck here and there in loose clusters.
He doesn’t strain his fret-glands a notch regarding the possibility
that if indeed The Devil were to do some Wacky Shit like have a
child, and if said child was going to have to endure a lengthy
political career afore he got to do anything especially diabolical,
then maybe Lucifer might make sure that the child is smart enough
not to fuck up the whole plan by making scary “I’m Evil” faces
every time anyone walks within fourteen kilometres of the bugger.
“Listen here”, The Devil would probably have said, “The last thing
we want is folks knowing that you’re the son of The Very Fucking
Devil, so don’t be doing anything daft like staring up past your
eyebrows every opportunity or scowling all sinister at monkeys for
no reason.”
John Moore. He couldn’t give any less of a shit about that sorta
nonsense if he tried.
He just points and shoots and his film totters carelessly from A to
B to C in a manner reminds a fella of the drunken student who’ll
ask you if you’ve seen Scarface and then, upon receiving an
affirmative answer, proceeds to recite every bastard line over and
over for the next nine hours.
Leaving the cinema, I’m saying to Beautiful Ms Gillian about how
I'm sorry. I’m all the sorry in the fucking world.
If’n I’d taken you to a sewer for to watch a hundred vagrants toss
off into one another’s hair, I tell her, if I’d done that, it’d
still have been better than this, and chances are there’d have been
97% less wank on display.
What I tell her is I had no idea, I really did think it might be
good.
But no.
Not a frame passes in The Omen 2006 without some horrific
imbecility or other bounding out the screen for to spray liquid
arse-paste cross a fella’s very eyes. It’s obnoxious and insulting
and has the personality of a dead dog’s scrotum.
The score is horrendous. The performances are identifiable as such
only cause the folks "performing" are known to have acted a time or
two in the past, and probably that's what they're up to here,
although who the hell could really tell? The young lad playing
Damien is, in all likelihood, the worst child actor in the history
of both the medium of cinema and of pre-teen scowling.
Under no artistic or moral criteria is this anywhere near tolerable
or worthwhile or even slightly less obnoxious than a fella coughing
vodka over your shoes at a funeral, whilst telling you all about
the time he sucked off a Shetland pony.
Still, I did get to sit in the dark with Beautiful Ms Gillian for
two blessed hours, and if nothing else, The Omen 2006 will at least
keep the Anti-Christ at bay for a time. The fucker'll be so
embarrassed and ashamed after this it's likely it'll be another six
millennia afore he dares think about showing his stupid pouting
face in public.
The Omen 2006, then. What unspeakably rotten tripe.
Sorry John.
Thanks folks.
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