Release Date: March 20, 1981
Watch Date: October 19, 2024
“The anti-Christ is back, but this time, the power of evil is no longer in the hands of a child. Damien Thorn is now 32 years-old and soon to become the American ambassador to England. At the same time, a new star of Bethlehem appears, indicating that the new Christ has been born somewhere in Britain. Seeking world domination, Damien charges his disciples to destroy every baby born on the night of the star’s appearance. Meanwhile a band of priests set out to destroy Damien, unleashing a series of demonic forces and spectacular accidents in the process. Will good overcome evil before it’s too late?”
So we got a little too excited about not having to watch any more movies to do with ‘The Omen’ for awhile, and we went a little bit out of order. I apologize profusely. Technically, this watch should have been ‘Aliens’, but that will be rescheduled to our next one. It’s not super confusing, and since Bob is so behind on ranking the films, I doubt many will notice anyways.
But, let’s focus on the task at hand, ‘Omen III’. Here we go.
I love Sam Neill. He is absolutely one of my favorite actors of all time, and never won’t be. I think he’s incredibly talented. I’ve never seen him this young before though, and that kind of shook me. But I mean, I was actually kind of excited to watch this one because he’s in it, and so, I figured watching him perform would at least make it tolerable.
And then the baby killings started.
Look, there’s not a lot of like, weird, “unexplained” murders in this one. No one is having their eyes pecked out by crows, or having part of a church land on them. This Damien is grown up, refined. He has babies to kill. And, mostly, the monks that are hunting him kind of put themselves in to precarious positions that have them winding up dead kind of on their own.
But the babies.
No, babies are not shown in this film actively dying. But I can hear them being alive, making little cooing noises, being babies – and really they’re meant to be newborns – and suddenly they’re not alive. I don’t think I was scared so much as I felt like the film had crossed a line. We don’t kill animals and we don’t kill babies. That’s just a general human rule. And what that says about the human psyche that we can watch adults be torn apart in the most gruesome way but I was panicked the cat wouldn’t survive in ‘Alien’ I don’t know. What I do know is that there was a montage of baby murders that Bob had to help me cover my ears for while I looked away and tried to think of, I dunno, puppies. It was pleasant.
The ending also got a little too Christian for me. Which is saying something. And, it was also something I should have expected from the final battle between the Second Coming of Jesus and the Antichrist. That feels like it’s going to have religious undertones, doesn’t it? But I wasn’t expecting a big giant glowing Jesus figure to appear and then disappear. That felt a little too on the nose. It’s also led up to by a scene of Damien wandering around some…ruins? Anyways he’s calling out for the Nazarene to come battle him and the whole time all I could think was, wasn’t the baby just born? Like…are you gonna go have a head to head battle with a week old baby? It doesn’t really feel fair to the baby. But, apparently Damien has gotten easier to kill in his old age. In the first film he needed all seven sacred knives stabbed into him in the shape of a cross. This one was just one good one in the back, problem solved.
Here’s, though, where I probably struggle the most with this franchise: Okay, so let’s say you are a devout Christian, and you believe that the Book of Revelations is a prophecy that will come to pass for God to bring about Heaven on Earth. Let’s just say that. And then let’s say you believe the Antichrist has appeared on Earth. Why would you try to kill him? Just hear me out. Because Jesus is supposed to return, and you believe the prophecy will be fulfilled which ultimately means that Jesus will defeat the Antichrist, not a human, and so what does it matter if you know who the Antichrist is. If you kill him, then he wasn’t the true Antichrist because he wasn’t defeated by the Son of Man as predicted in the prophecy of the book of Revelations. And even if you’re trying to help Jesus, or protect him, or whatever, he’s not going to need that. Because he’s God made human. So if God wants Jesus to win, or wants him to survive infancy or whatever, he’s going to make that happen. You’re going to have very little part in it. I get, maybe, when Damien was a kid, because you could argue you were just trying to prevent a lot of stuff. But if we’re at the point where the second coming is actively happening, maybe just take a back seat?
Just my opinion.
The Omen franchise is over for us, for now, we’ve got a prequel and remake to get to, but I highly doubt that will be this Halloween, and I can’t imagine I’ll be very thrilled to watch either of them (I don’t like prequels in the best of circumstances and this won’t be the best of circumstances). For now, I look forward to finishing off Halloween with mostly sci-fi themed horror. That seems a little less applicable to my day to day life.
Doc and Bob's Disney Adventure 
Leave a comment