THE OMEN (1976) One-and-a-half stars
The British have a great word to describe all THE OMEN movies: “bollocks.”

We can also substitute “poppycock,” “hogwash,” and “balderdash,” some of the best words in the English language.

THE OMEN movies are nothing more than an excuse to watch familiar and sometimes big-name performers be systematically eliminated in bizarre, gruesome ways. Sounds great, eh?

Not when the audience gets bludgeoned with the great significance of it all, unlike the average exploitation movie. We have some frenzied overacting, a whole lot of pretension, a relentless musical score, and a ridiculous storyline that’s like a Satanist soap opera.

Sometimes I like all of those elements in a movie but THE OMEN movies lay it on so damn thick with them all that I just balk and become an unrepentant nonbeliever.

Off the top of my old noggin, only THE AMITYVILLE HORROR movies compete with THE OMEN series for my least favorite horror series.

I’ll quote from the IMDb for a handy plot summary: “Robert and Katherine Thorn seem to have it all. They are happily married and he is the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, but they want nothing more than to have children. When Katherine has a stillborn child, Robert is approached by a priest at the hospital who suggests that they take a healthy newborn whose mother has just died in childbirth. Without telling his wife he agrees. After relocating to London, strange events (and the ominous warnings of a priest) lead him to believe that the child he took from that Italian hospital is evil incarnate.”

Robert and Katherine Thorn are played by Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, respectively, and they’re our leading big names. Peck naturally plays the great reluctant believer and every OMEN and AMITYVILLE HORROR movie needs one main character to constantly postpone the inevitable. What will it take to convince Peck’s Robert Thorn that his son’s the Antichrist? Unfortunately for us and the movie, it will take a whole helluva lot to convince Robert Thorn. I lost patience with Thorn (and the movie) long, long before he takes action down the home stretch.

Mainly it’s because THE OMEN and its sequels gave birth to what I call “The Omen Syndrome” or any time any character figures out a dread secret and either spills the beans or merely plans to, you can just bet your bottom dollar that in the next few minutes that character will be killed in the most unpleasant way possible. THE OMEN movies all played on this basic scenario time and time again. That makes them deadly predictable, and that’s when you earn a syndrome named after you.

To be fair, THE OMEN does have a few effective moments, but they all probably add up to 10-15 minutes of screen time and we’re talking about a movie that lasts nearly two hours. Those 10-15 minutes amount to the death scenes and the moments of danger, but the rest of the movie irritated me to no end unlike, for example, THE EXORCIST, a film that involved me from beginning to end. Because of the few effective moments, I have awarded the first OMEN movie 1/2 star more than its sequels.

At this point, I’d rather talk about the actors who played Damien in the first three OMEN movies.

English actor Harvey Stephens played the devil child and it was his first role. I mean, wow, where the Hell do you go from playing the Antichrist? Stephens only took on two more film roles: Young Emil in the 1980 TV movie “Gauguin the Savage” and Tabloid Reporter No. 3 in THE OMEN remake (2006). In 2017, Stephens received a suspended prison sentence for his 2016 road rage attack on a pair of cyclists; Mr. Stephens knocked one cyclist unconscious with a punch and punched the other cyclist several times in the face. Stephens received sentences of 14 months, suspended for two years.

Brazilian-born English actor Jonathan Scott-Taylor played a teenage Damien in the first sequel that’s set in Chicago (before John Hughes) and stars William Holden and Lee Grant in the Peck and Remick parts. Scott-Taylor’s career peaked with Damien and his last film performance came in a 1985 movie named SHADEY.

New Zealand actor Sam Neill took on Damien for THE FINAL CONFLICT and he’s the only one of the three actors to sustain a film career. We’ve seen Neill in everything from DEAD CALM and THE PIANO to THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER and JURASSIC PARK.

By the way, isn’t anybody who names their child Damien just asking for it?