60 Nights of Horror 2022 #3: The Omen III: The Final Conflict

Okay, this isn’t going to be so much an analysis as it is the things that flowed through my mind as I watched this movie I haven’t seen since I was like 12. I watched it on probably TNT or something, because I had zero recollection of witnessing Lisa Harrow’s spectacular side boob back then, and honestly, very little recollection of the movie as a whole.

This movie’s opening sequence begins with a demolition worker finding the daggers of Megiddo in the foundation of the building that was destroyed in the last movie, you know, when Damien was a sweet baby angel teen baby boy nugget. No word as to why it’s taken them this long to gut that wreckage and turn it into something new but it’s fine, we’re going to pretend that the events of the previous two films (The Omen came out in 1976 and Damien: Omen II came out in 1978) didn’t just happen, they actually happened like… a long time ago. Cool cool cool, tight tight tight.

Anyway these daggers tho, the seven daggers of Megiddo are the only things that can kill Damien, and they’ve been assembled again, positively identified, gone up for auction, purchased by a sect of assassin monks who are then tasked with putting the hurt on Damien Thorn, who they apparently had forgotten was the antichrist because you’ve still got folks going “BuT ArE yOu sUrE?” All this happens in the first five minutes, overlaid by a sumptuous score by Jerry Goldsmith, laying it on thick. All I could think while watching this sequence was that there was so much going on, that if Roman Polanski had done this (one of my friends was disappointed that his timeline didn’t line up with Rosemary’s Baby, which planted the seed) that this sequence of finding the daggers, getting them all in one place, identifying and verifying their legitimacy, selecting the crack team of killer priests, that would have been 2/3, maybe 3/4 of the movie. And it would have been fucking phenomenal. I’d have eaten that shit UP.

Instead….

We meet 32 year old Damien as he screens an ad meant to make Thorn Industries look more philanthropic, and he’s annoyed because he actually doesn’t have any recorded evidence of his company doing good charitable work except stuff that’s already been shot by other people. Which is funny because largely this movie focuses on his love affair with media and mass communication.

He’s located a prophecy that suggests he’s at the end of his reign of 100 score and 30 days (about seven years), and it’s been about seven years since he took over Thorn Industries and now the second coming of Christ is about to happen in England. Some new baby Jesus is coming and every day that kid lives is a loss of strength and power for Damien. (When one supreme rises, etc.) Boo-Boo, THIS was your reign? Running some companies? You and your lil Charles Foster Ofdensen, and your lil dawg? No leisure? I thought you were WORKING TOWARDS world domination, this ain’t enough for me. I was disappointed by it.

I mean, he DID get to bully the POTUS into appointing him ambassador to Great Britain, because the original US ambassador made room by killing himself with a typewriter ribbon Rube Goldberg shotgun contraption (somehow without getting typewriter ribbon ink all over his hands) with a beautiful headshot effect. That effect alone makes this worth watching. Anyway we need a new American ambassador, why not this untested 32 year old businessman with a daddy complex and a rottweiler bound to shit allllllll over these carpets? Let’s do it, great! And it’s a good thing too, cause Christ is cumming. Also I was gonna ask how this ambassador got a shotgun into the embassy and just kept it under his desk but then I remembered when Billy Bob Thornton was the president in Love Actually and I bet he had one too. It’s such a Yank thing to keep a shotty under your desk when surrounded by tea-drinkers.

So Damien comes rolling into England and meets a plucky Barbara Walters-type television interview journalist (Sam Neill’s then wife, Lisa Harrow, who resembles a slightly younger Rue McClanahan til she gets naked and I’m like OH I GET IT carry on) and she has a 12 year old son who is immediately enamored of him. Seriously, this kid is giving fuck-me eyes to Damien every moment they are onscreen together. I almost spat out my drink at one point, like Jesus somebody stop this kid, this smoldering little shit’s gonna get everyone sent to prison. Except the priests, they’re just gonna get relocated to another parish. Womp womp.

These priests. These supposed assassins. Okay this is a thing that has been used time and again, especially in the previous two films. It’s a common thing for Damien to scowl or pout and then someone around him dies a horribly imaginative death. The whole plot structure of each Omen movie is basically some effects technician had a great idea for a kill and the writer and director said “yeah we can frame something around that.” The kills in this movie are GREAT. Even the offscreen ones. The way they are shot is so effective that I was cackling at what I knew they wanted me to imagine.

Each priest dies in a way that they 1000% should have seen coming. I’m not even a bible reader and I know that Satan was given dominion over the earth and that includes animals. The dumb fuck riding in on a horse? Did he not think that Damien would look that horse in the eye, how the fuck you think you’re gonna sneak up on the lord of the beasts of the earth? Idiot. Priest who trapped Damien and all thirty of his hunting dogs (in my canon they are all named Helen) on the little bridge, did he not think that the son of Lucifer himself, the commander of all fauna, would not sic his pack of Hellhounds to rip him to shreds? 30 Helens agree, you’re a fucking idiot. The two priests who ran away from the lightning and got themselves trapped in the oubliette after taking out one of their own, Polonius-style, that’s a three-fer! IDIOTS. But the television studio assassination attempt. Y’all. Go watch it. That’s the stuff of nightmares and I would not want to die that way.

My favorite deaths, though, would have to be those of EVERY BABY BORN BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN ON MARCH 24. Damien assembles about 400 of his disciples in this lovely windy canyon and he tells them all, Palpatine-style, to execute Order 666: seek out these babies and dispatch them in whatever way they see fit, as long as these babies die. You don’t see one baby die, you really don’t, and yet the set ups are so great that I had a fabulous time. My personal favorite was the boy scouts who showed up to do their good deed for the day.

My bf and I were also running with the idea of him trying to locate each baby, like hitting up a telephone party line and being like “Aye, so anyone have any uh… anybody have any babies lately?” and then he shows up to kill one and Chris Hansen comes round the corner like “So you came here because you thought you were going to meet a 3 day old baby. Instead you found me. Why don’t you take a seat?”

Speaking of taking a seat, we HAVE to talk about the giant backwards wooden crucifix that Damien, I guess, brought with him to his new post in England? Who packed it up? Who was in charge of packing all these artifacts and stuff that he brought with him but the face down ass up Christ on the cross, ripe for submissively hearing the most dramatic monologue I’ve ever paid zero attention to because I was so busy laughing, this fucking crucifix, I’ve never wanted an art piece so desperately for my own stupid house. It’s so blasphemous, and it’s only there so he can yell at it and suggestively stand behind it and press his boner into it while he rants about how he’s gonna win. It’s trash. I love it. I want one.

At the end of the day, Damien does anal with the reporter and claws her back all up and then uses her son as a human shield during another assassination attempt, and is surprised when she stabs him in retaliation, as stated in the prophecy. It’s anticlimactic, but it does give Jerry Goldsmith a reason to resolve into a major key as white Jesus glows from the sky and bible verses show onscreen for some reason.

I’m not a fan of these folks trying to thwart prophecies. Damien you are not an idiot. Trying to thwart the prophecy that has been laid down time and again is a fucking fool’s errand. Even after he has every baby born between midnight and dawn on March 24 killed, we find out from the Catholics “Yeah, the Christ baby is safe, he’s been safe this whole time, no big deal what’s important is that we kill the Batman” like WHAT? So your god just LET THAT HAPPEN? Your god just let ALL those babies die for no fucking reason? You god just allowed all that suffering cause what, cause HIS kid was safe? Cause Damien was gonna get backstabbed by someone close to him anyway? So all those families, lives ruined, whatever. It’s old hat at this point, the rudeness and disrespect of deities.

Anyway I had a good time, but not as good of a time as I had before Damien knew what was what. The first two movies were groundbreaking. This one was fun, and Sam Neill is a gem, but I don’t know what I was expecting. I think I’m disappointed that it’s not as bad as I was led to believe it would be, that its merits outweigh its detriments. Ave satani!