The Big Whatsit

The law of diminishing returns would suggest that in the Omen Quadrilogy, the quality drops with each instalment. Certainly, the original chapter is the best, and by some distance, and public opinion has it that the virtue of the movies goes into a tailpsin subsequently. I’m no stranger to producing charts, and based on IMDb user ratings, the score for each film produces a line that looks like this:

Damning (pun not intended) evidence if ever it existed, and far from a glowing recommendation for Omen IV, a flick upon which I am yet to inflict my eyes. Yet I really like The Final Conflict, the film that ended the original cycle of Omen titles. Admittedly, I write that with my tongue lodged firmly inside a cheek. It isn’t a particularly good piece of work; at times, its silliness reaches laughable proportions. However, certain aspects save it from being the utter tosh it so easily could have been, and I do not at this point refer to the extracts from Biblical texts that appear on the screen at the climax, as though this lends it any degree of profundity.

First, the plot, and fortunately this is something TFC possesses (and yes, that is a catty reference to the killfest that is Damien Omen II). Damien Thorn (Sam Neill) is by now an adult. At 32, his ownership of Thorn Industries has developed the company into a bastion of capitalism, with its unethical exploitation of Third World misery brushed under the carpet somewhat. Say what you like about the film’s commentary on western values, but as far as the American President is concerned Thorn is a rising star. It isn’t long before he’s installed as Ambassador to the UK, ostensibly the legacy to his father’s work. But of course, Damien being Damien, there’s an ulterior motive, and it is that he believes the second coming of Christ will take place in Britain - from the Book of Revelations the ‘Angel Isle,’ which thanks to the sort of logic that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Treasure Hunt means these very shores.

As usual, Damien has friends and enemies, and the latter make up a sect of monks from the monastery of Subiaco in Italy. Led by Father DeCarlo (Rossano Brazzi), each Brother is given one of the sacred knives, the only weapon that can vanquish the Antichrist. The order moves to London, and then sets about co-ordinating their attacks. Needless to say, these start going horribly wrong, though the death scenes are generally not in the same league as the imaginative endings dreamed up for DOII - that said, the bloke who is set on fire after being wrapped in plastic enjoys a horrifically sticky finish. Father DeCarlo is on hand to witness the Second Coming take place. It’s foretold by the convergence of three stars. Their line-up will pinpoint the exact position that Christ will return, but Damien doesn’t get this and subsequently orders the death of all male children born in Britain on the day of the second coming. He can do this thanks to a growing sect of followers, which is made up of people from all walks of life, including children and even the clergy. In one of the film’s best staged scenes, Damien addresses a vast audience of worshippers and at this point looks entirely unstoppable.

If Damien’s diabolical doings are the high points of TFC, then its lows are the romantic interludes. Everyone’s favourite spawn of Satan meets a journalist for ‘British television,’ Kate Reynolds (Lisa Harrow), along with her impressionable son, Peter (Barnaby Holm). As his unlikely affair with Kate grows more intimate, it’s his relationship with Peter that really counts. The boy is simply no match for the charming wiles of the Antichrist. By the movie’s end, Peter’s devotion to Damien far greater than his love for his mother, a development that will have tragic consequences. Worse is to come for Harvey Dean (Don Gordon), his devoted PA. Dean is unlucky enough to have a baby who was born within the exact timeframe that Damien ordered all newborns to be destroyed. Anyone who has followed the series of films up to now will know that he doesn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance.

TFC’s producers deliberately went for a talented unknown to play Damien. Their choice was young Kiwi actor, Sam Neill, an almost perfect piece of casting as it turned out. Neill has always been a reliable star, but he’s at his best when in the role of a baddie - few do ‘reptilian’ better, and what makes him ideal for this is his subtlety. Damien isn’t a shouter. He can do with a malevolent glare what it would most take most actors several lines of dialogue to convey. Witness his supposedly metaphysical relationship with animals, and you can see why Neill raises several extremely silly scenes to almost believable levels.

Almost. But not quite. The film might have lucked out in scooping Sam Neill, but even he has a job on his hands to save the daft plot. How on earth, for instance, does he manage to co-ordinate the slaying of the first born? It’s suggested that everyone is in such thrall to him that there’s no possibility of this being investigated to any serious degree i.e. at no point are any of the ‘killers’ discovered, and then the murders traced back to their source. Then there’s the dispatching of his own would-be slayers. Damien’s mind control over the hounds might just about get away with it - the series’ ‘rules’ have already established that animals obey the Antichrist - but the bit where he dupes two of the priests into stabbing one of their own stretches credibility still further.

Worst of all though is his relationship with Kate. According to Lisa Harrow, she and Neill enjoyed more than a little chemistry off the set, but it isn’t translated on to the screen. Despite Damien exerting a smug presence with her at all times, gaining control over her son and treating her to a bout of rough sex, Kate comes back for more, which doesn’t make an awful lot of sense, let alone the statement it makes about women in general. When it comes down to it, the character doesn’t even need to be there in the first place. You get the impression she’s been added in at a later date, the producers feeling the need for some love interest for their lonely Antichrist.

It’s directed by Graham Baker, whose pedestrian approach to the material means the film is never more than competently told. All the subtlety of Richard Donner’s original is by now long gone, making for a straightforward battle between Damien and his assassins. There are good moments - the aforementioned address, which comes across a little like a perverse pastiche of the mass gatherings listening to Billy Graham, is one; another comes with the depictions of Damien’s followers doing away with babies. Seasoned viewers will, however, spot the plot developments coming from a mile away. You know as soon as you see the Subiaco monks that they’ll be handed their cards before too long. The same fate is obviously going to befall anyone who shows the merest hint of getting in Damien’s way, which makes for a depressing lack of tension.

Things reach a nadir with the climax. This promises much with its Fountains Abbey setting and the portent of Damien clashing with a post-Second Coming Christ. Yet, and without wanting to give away the ending, nothing much happens. It’s an unforgivable anti-climax, made worse because the movie has been working up to this point all along and then wimps out at the point of closure. The filming adds a bizarre dimension by half of the scenes being shot at dusk whilst others take place during the night; then rather randomly it’s all spliced together to leave the audience perplexed - just what sort of time is it when this happens?

That the film survives with some sort of coherency is a virtual miracle, and those rather jarring issues apart, it’s pretty good fun. Viewers expecting an instalment that retains the spirit of Donner’s offering will disappointed. The Final Conflict isn’t in the same class. Its insertion of verses from Revelations at the end hint at the kind of quality that is never really in evidence. But its borrowing from Jerry Goldsmith’s original score provide some continuity, whilst Neill and Brazzi lend it a touch of class. There are some lovely, flowery monologues from Damien to chuckle over (’Nazarene, charlatan, what can you offer humanity? Since the hour you vomited forth from the gaping wound of a woman, you have done nothing but drown man’s soaring desires in a deluge of sanctimonious morality‘ - who talks like that?) and a sense of earnestness that keeps things moving. The sum total isn’t anyone’s idea of a good film, or even a truly frightening one, yet it provides a pulpy, entertaining end to a trilogy that, in all truth, was fairly silly to begin with.