210 - Damien: Omen II

    Young Damien learns that he’s the antichrist and attends a military academy as people looking into him wind up dying.
    My favorite surprise was seeing Lance Henriksen in this.  He’s always a pleasure to see.
    I wasn’t especially impressed with the first Omen movie… or the remake, which I saw in theaters.  But I wasn’t looking for anything that I’d have strong feelings about.  I’m really feeling kind of down, so I didn’t want anything too serious, or too funny.  Somehow, this was actually about the right level for my mood.
    There are some big problems with this movie, but they don’t become apparent until later on.  There aren’t any really great sequences, like the public suicide in the first movie.  Instead, we get a series of short set pieces that involve peculiar deaths.  A lady has a heart attack after a crow sits at the end of her bed.  A car dies, and a lady gets out, and is attacked by a crow, blinding her, leading to her being hit by a truck.  A doctor gets in an elevator, plummets, then gets cut in half by a wire.  These scenes hold no surprises.  The opening kill sequence is actually pretty well done, involving a pair of people being buried alive as rocks and sand fill in an underground passage.
    The story is really minimal.  Damien doesn’t actually do that much.  He’s a passive character, and doesn’t seem malicious.  I don’t know what I think of this.  It changes the primary antagonist to being something vague - “the forces of evil.”
    I can’t really point to much of a story.  Every person that discovers or suspects something about Damien dies quickly, so there’s no tension built up.  All of it just leads up to his father learning, believing in it, then making the decision that Damien should die.  This part of the story happens in the last 15-20 minutes.  When he comes around, it’s not believable.  He just spent the rest of the running time denying the possibility, then he was persuaded because of some ancient artwork that sort of looks like it could be Damien?
    There’s also one death scene that’s especially funny, because it relied on the victim not pushing himself out of the way.  Somehow, he gets stuck on the front connector for a train car, and just stays there.  It seemed like it required more effort to stay on it than to get off.
    The more interesting approach would have been to focus on Damien’s time in the military academy.  There’s very little time spent there, and it doesn’t come across like this was especially important.  Instead of crafting his own identity, Damien is told who he is.  Not an interesting way to handle it.
    There’s another nice thing about the movie though.  They tone down the music cues that made the first one hilarious to watch.