TV Cream

Films: D is for...

Damien – Omen II

We’re still flogging this theory that the middle film of a trilogy was always the best – or was it the worst? On the one hand you’ve got your Empire Strikes Back (don’t argue) and your Godfather: Part II, but on the other you’ve got your Temple of Doom and this load of old bobbins. True, the little fella who plays Damien is genuinely creepy, but in a no-friends-talks-to-himself-at school-calls-his-schoolbag-by-a-name kind of way and not necessarily in a son-of-Satan-bringer-of-darkness kind of way. True, it does star Leo I’m off on a residential course in double-entry bookkeeping’ McKern, though not for long, and Ian ‘Don Quick’ Hendry, but that’s little consolation for a film whose most sinister dramatic device is some ancient scribblins on a wall.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Lee James Turnock

    May 21, 2010 at 4:49 pm

    The bit where Mark’s supposed to be suffering from a debilitating brain aneurysm looks more like somebody turned his personal stereo up too loud. I used to think the blinding from a raven’s beak bit was pretty effective, but logic tells me she should have just grabbed the fucking bird and stamped on it.

  2. Sidney Balmoral James

    November 11, 2021 at 6:41 pm

    This one perhaps due a reappraisal – it has some slow sequences, but is overall quite a frightening film, with some well staged death scenes (bird-blinding and truck squashing combo, cut in half by a lift cable, sandwiched between cars on a train etc.) and William Holden’s increasing anxiety is quite well done. One of the handful of high budget 70s horror films which don’t seem to be rated very highly these days with people preferring lower budget fare from that era. I’m presuming that Hollywood would never again contribute these sorts of budgets to horror again, but I may be wrong.

    • THX 1139

      November 11, 2021 at 8:24 pm

      The crow blinding of Elizabeth Shepherd is genuinely horrible, and probably the “best” bit, but the rest has all of the “take us seriously because The Bible” portentousness of the original but none of the grim sense of humour at the futile humans. Still, it was the first real novelty death horror franchise out of many to come.

  3. Sidney Balmoral James

    November 11, 2021 at 8:45 pm

    ELizabeth Shepherd of course who should have been Mrs. Peel, and indeed was for about two episodes, and then was sacked: which must have been a drastic and costly decision.

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