Oct 061981
 
one reel

Damien Thorn (Sam Neill), the Antichrist, is a dominant world financial figure as chairman of the Thorn Corporation, and is gaining political power.  But there are two threats to Damien: a group of priests who have recovered seven daggers that can kill him, and the second coming of Christ.

“With all the power of evil, with fire and brimstone, with the intensity of hate and the foulness of Hell itself, I shall curse the world, condemning it to…a brief recession.”

I really thought the apocalypse would be more apocalyptic. The Devil just ain’t what he used to be. The Antichrist has been ruling for 7 years (or 10 cubits or twelve parsecs, it’s hard to keep these prophesies straight) and the worst he’s manage to inflict upon mankind is an economic climate equivalent to what George Bush (either one) created. I guess I was hoping for more evil than the nightly news could give me.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with Sam Neill as the Antichrist. It’s a larger than life role and he plays it up big.  Seductive, cruel, and generally sympathetic, Neill is what goes right with The Final Conflict.

What goes wrong? Pretty much everything else, particularly the script. The Omen  worked because it took a large scale, horrific situation, and presented it in terms of the personal pain of an individual and the destruction of his family. It gave us tension we could understand from normal life, and let that flow into the larger evil. But there is no good guy whose problems we can sympathize with. Instead, the only character who is the least bit engaging is Damien. That takes any horror out of the killings and left me rooting for the bad guy. That’s fine, but makes this into a different kind of film, one where the joy comes from watching evil do really evil things. But that isn’t the film they shot. There’s not nearly enough nasty deeds, and in the end, we’re supposed to hope he fails. But then the end of the film is wrong in every way it is possible to be wrong. Things don’t climax, but just whimper away.

The writers of The Final Conflict can’t even stick with the The Omen mythology, where it took all seven daggers used in a specific way to kill the Antichrist. Now, any one dagger used in any way will do the trick. That’s a minor problem in a film that ignores the Bible to make up its own scriptures. If you’ve taken the proper psychotropics, The Book of Revelations has plenty of material for a scary, truly bizarre film. But I doubt the makers of this film have read Revelations, or even seen the first film.

What the film has is really stupid monks. This ancient order, which knows everything about Damien (at least they watched the first film) sets out to kill him by having its members moving slowly, falling down, and making sure that they are wearing their red “kill me now” shirts. In what is both the best, and the silliest scene in the film, Damien is “trapped” on a bridge between two of the monks during a fox hunt. He does his magic eye glance, and monk number one bites it. So what does monk number two do?  Nothing.  He patiently waits his turn to be killed. The shot of Neill with the hounds around him looks great, but the tail-wagging dogs don’t exactly inspire fear. Call this the Death of a Thousand Licks by Happy Puppies.

Followed Damien: Omen II.