These days, switching an established horror series over to the small screen is a fairly regular and painless occurrence with franchises such as The Evil Dead, From Dusk Till Dawn and the upcoming Chucky making a usually smooth transition. However, back in the 90’s, things were a little different as the divide between the two formats was as seemingly cavernous as the literal distance between heaven and hell and if you wanted to give your franchise a new life of the idiot box then the TV movie was the way to go.
So in 1991, Fox broadcast this Canadian made attempt to jumpstart the Omen franchise that had been lying dormant since Damian Thorn had his back lethally scratched by a sacred dagger way back in 1981 much in the same way Universal tried to resurrect the Psycho franchise a year before. Does this second coming (or technically fourth) manage to give the Devil his due?
Virginian power couple Gene and Keren York (congressman and attorney respectively) decide to adopt after years of trying for a baby so into their lives plops little Delia, thanks to a nun-run orphanage. However, it doesn’t take long for weird occurrences to start happening around the innocent looking tot such as the baby managing to nastily scratch it’s mother no long after birth and the priest at Delia’s baptism keeling over from a mystery coronary – but as the child matures more over seven years, things get even freakier. The boy Deliah remorselessly bullies at school until his wets himself gets an even nastier shock when his father gets pulled in a car accident, a random rottweiler turns up whom Delia immediate adopts and most unsettling of all, Karen is notified by the family doctor that her adopted daughter is menstruating even though she’s barely eight!
Events take an even further detour to destination: WTF when the York’s new age practicing nanny discovers that her healing Crystal’s have blackened at Delia’s touch and that a subsequent trip to a Mysticism Fair in order to sneakily photograph the girl’s aura (I’m not kidding) ends in disaster.
At this point, Karen mercifully starts to cotton on that her general unease at Delia’s presence is far more than just finding the precocious little sociopath obnoxious to be around (Gene is no bloody help whatsoever thanks to his bid to run for the Senate), hires a private investigator to dig up and info on the nuns who handed Delia over in the first place. However, the goal posts change dramatically when Karen discovers that after years of trying, she’s now suddenly pregnant just like that and her fears for herself transfer over to her paranoia that Delia now really wants to hurt her baby. Where did Delia come from exactly, why is her lineage going to be such a big fucking deal in the coming weeks and does Karen have any chance of slowing events that have already been long set in motion?
Despite having been co-written by the guy who came up with the story of Damien: Omen II, Omen IV distinctly feels like it was cobbled together by people whose only sole knowledge of the series was to read the synopsis from the back of of the DVD covers and then try to figure it out from there.
It goes pretty much as well as you’d expect as that all important mixture of melodramatic dread and stone-dead seriousness that Richard Donner so carefully crafted for the original goes right out the window like a victim of one of satan’s highly dubious “accidents”. For the most part the films managed kept Damien’s unholy heritage from him (he cottoned on about two thirds of the way through part II) but even when the Sam Neill version was holding all the cards, the trilogy kept things subtle, letting the actor’s performance and Jerry Goldsmith’s score carry the strain. Delia is something different altogether – the movie seems to give her complete and total knowledge as to the devilish part she has to play, not to mention more overt powers that involves Beyonce’s industrial powered wind machine kicking in at one point while she’s flicking a particularly venomous death stare at someone.
However, despite the movie’s insistence that having someone see a random, upside down cross cast by a shadow or a reflection while the soundtrack screams at you in Latin (which seems to happen every fifteen fucking minutes) is scary, Omen IV rarely rises above being fucking stupid. The sequence set at the New Age Fair is a gold standard in fucking ludicrousness as psychics hilariously overact as Delia stalks past them like their getting mind-raped by one of David Cronenberg’s Scanners.
Directors Dominique Othenin-Girard (who coincidentally also drove the Halloween franchise into the ground with it’s fifth installment) and Jorge Montesi seemingly got out of their way to make the story simultaneously rushed and yet somehow also painfully slow while often veering wildly into unintentionally hilarious territory.
Instead of generating unbearable creeping dread with a clutch of spectacular deaths, the majority of the bodycount here can be mostly attributed to people badly acting out heart attacks. However when the movie attempts to aim big it just seems silly – a snake attack is amusing enough but Michael Lerner’s fateful rendezvous with a runaway wrecking ball brings out the belly laughs due to the bizarre look he has on his face just before impact. He’s supposed to be reeling from a supposedly horrific vision of the world after the devil has won (although pale, black toothed carol singers and a weird nativity diorama doesn’t really seem that bad) but instead he just looks like he’s stuck in the middle of the world’s longest brain fart before disaster hits…
Even the movie’s twist is aggressively stupid as (spoilers incoming) it’s revealed that Delia is the child of Damien Thorn but actually isn’t the Anti-Christ at all but instead has been carrying her twin brother inside her womb since birth and satanists transplant the foetus over to Karen to make her think it’s her own. So technically, Delia is essentially her own twin’s mother (good luck finding a Hallmark card for that) and it’s her brother/son who’s the actual Anti-Christ in waiting complete with the 666 birthmark located this time for some reason on the palm of his hand.
Plodding, boring and as featuring plot twists that are as easy to swallow as a sandpaper watermelon, not only will Omen IV: The Awakening put you straight to sleep but also works overtime to prove that the Devil may have the best tunes, but some of his movie sequels fucking suck…
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