The OctOmen- The Final Conflict (But..Not Really)

Welcome back to the Third Row for this, our continuing installments in tracking the weird, wild path of the cinematic Antichrist that is The OctOmen.

We last left things in the wake of teenage Damien coming into his own at the end of the second movie, with all obstacles out of his way and the most powerful company in the world now in his hands. Things onscreen are looking pretty good for the old son of a jackal. Offscreen, it was a bit of a different story - the sequel opened to mixed reviews, and while it made its budget back, the box office compared to its predecessor was a sizable step down - less than half what the previous made.

Flash forward three more years as Harvey Bernhard brings the story of Damien Thorn to a close with The Final Conflict. It's worth noting upfront that this was the official title it was marketed under. While the taglines made it clearer it was part of the Omen series, it wasn't originally labeled as such, to the point where even the movie itself still bears that original, implicit standalone title.

Told ya...

Like Damien before it, this is a movie I've had a hard time really pinpointing my issues with before. In truth, I still am to an extent, but I have at least narrowed the field this time around.

Having said that, and since I'm already inviting the comparison – I'll say this much: for as much as this movie has been given the reputation as the truly bad one (one famous example being George Lowe's Space Ghost calling it 'That crappy third one where he's president'), I actually can't really say this one's much worse than part II. There's even some parts of this I'd argue are an improvement over the previous movie, though in turn there's other areas where it finds new ways to stumble.

And while I'm not gonna go full 'Actually...' here...
Yeah, no, Damien doesn't really become president. It's a few lines of setup for it down the line and that's as far as it goes.
Sorry folks.

Let's start with the good things then so this isn't just completely dragging on the movie.

First, another shout-out to Jerry Goldsmith for continuing to deliver consistently good work to this series. As I'd said before, I give the man a lot of credit for resisting the temptation to just keep reheating the first score when he could have cashed that check and moved on to something else. I'll also cop to this – I genuinely like this movie's main theme/opening titles. I don't feel like the rest of the movie quite lives up to what that music is trying to build it to, but on its own, I happen to like the song.

As far as what it is trying to build to, I have some issues with how it’s done, but I will give this much – I do appreciate the fact this movie feels like it's trying for higher stakes than the previous entry right out of the gate. Not to say II that had no stakes as much as it was a case of them being so badly defined within the movie that it made a lot of the film on its own feel inconsequential. By comparison, this movie kicks off with the gloves off – a team of monks already know exactly who Damien is, and are making plans to kill him. Also, the Second Coming, but that’s saved for later in the movie.

"Dear Lord, bless me and the rest of the vaguely defined monks of the Order of the Dead Meat."

Finally, I must again give this series credit for casting, in this movie’s case for the three leads. Lisa Harrow tends to be the overlooked part of this movie, but as the skeptic/normal person in this pitch, she has the thankless job of walking the familiar track of realizing Damien isn't who he seems. For a familiar role, she plays it with enough good chemistry with Sam Neill to make her stand out as a variation on a theme rather than a rote retread. As the movie's prestige casting pull, Rossano Brazzi likewise makes more out of less in this. Father De Carlo is a decent idea as a character, but he doesn't have much to him from a pure character/writing standpoint. As a result, what allows De Carlo to make any sort of impression comes from Brazzi giving the role a mix of sad wisdom and warmth that saves it from feeling like misusing your veteran actor for a plot device.

And finally, as the man at the center of this, we have Sam Neill. I am just going to say it out right – if you seek this out for one reason, save for completion's sake, Sam Neill's performance as Damien is arguably it. At the time of his casting, he was still something of a fresh-faced unknown with a lot to prove in Hollywood, and to his credit, he is bringing a lot to this movie – potentially more than it deserved - imbuing the villainous Damien with equal parts charisma and a menace that teeters between cold calculation and animal intensity as the scene calls for. I told myself I wasn't going to spend too much time building up Neill in this, but really, as this movie goes, he is its strongest feature.

"You can just keep waiting there, I'm not gonna hug you!"

Okay...and on that strong note, let's go through the downsides quick.

First, and easier to explain – this is probably the first time watching this movie that it's ever really sunk in for me how erratic the pace of this story gets at points. Not in a sense that it feels like the movie is wasting time anywhere as much as it feels like it’s split between two main stories and rather than threading them together, one is mostly burned through quickly, so they can then focus all their attention on the other, keeping just the leftover necessary elements of the first for later use. From the supplemental info I'd seen for this, I’m not sure if this was just how it came together or if this was a product of rewriting, but it is striking how sharp the split between the two main plots is.

The other is both a pro and a con that heralds back to my main grievance with Damien: Omen II – the question of just how much this movie embraces being a horror story.

Part of the problem here is with the story they've set up for themselves. It's not a bad story and it at least provides some momentum and stakes this time around. As a horror narrative, however, it's again light on much horror beyond the surface 'DEVIL!' aspects. 

Feel free to consider this a pro or con at your discretion, but really, some of the most unsettling parts of this movie are just seeing Sam Neill glare at those who cross him. Again, great performance, but really feels like the movie could have done more for menace.

There's a line in one scene where Damien, in describing a prophecy to his right-hand man derisively comments “The thing about these pedantic Christians is they stick to the letter on their prophecies.” It's not intentional, but the line makes an accurate summation of a problem these sequels have – they seem less interested in making a good, scary narrative about the demonic spawn of Satan on their own and more with trying to make the movies' stories track with the Book of Revelations. It makes the ending of this one especially awkward when we go from the dark endings of the last two movies to this literally ending with the triumphant return of the reborn Christ. It's in keeping with the Biblical canon, but it's also a strange note for the series to end with and feels almost uncharacteristic.

To this sequel's credit, it does find more moments than Damien did to work in a few jolts and genuinely creepy ideas, so I want to give them some credit. Unfortunately, those moments tend to be undercut by the fact that, like its predecessor, this movie seems reluctant to really own some of the more overt horror touches. This movie almost hurts more for it, thanks to it being easier to tell this production was getting ham-strung on its budget, with several sequences cut from footage from both the first Omen and from, ironically, former Omen director Richard Donner’s Superman II.

A sequence that makes a good example of the movie's shortened leash is early one when an ambassador is driven to suicide by Damien’s influence. The scene is trying to call back to the nanny's suicide from the first film, with the man running afoul of Damien's Rottweiler who is supposed to impart demonic influence. I'm trying to save book content for the book section (and believe me, I will be back to this scene there), but one touch the authors did well throughout the books that the movies skipped is establishing the dogs acting under Damien as having eerie yellow eyes. I say this here not as a nitpick that at the lack of yellow eyes, but they probably might have helped here because...well, see the attached screencap – this dog's cute. They're not full puppy dog-level, but those are still genuinely sweet eyes and they really don't sell the menace the moment is supposed to have. 

I'm sorry, those just aren't the terrifying eyes of a Hell hound.
I want to give this dog a hug.

Following the dog encounter, the ambassador returns to his office and has a moment staring in a mirror – the scene was originally meant to be an effect shot where he looks in the mirror and is confronted with a jackal skull. The filmmakers weren't happy with how the effect turned out, so it was cut, and instead we just have the man staring at his own normal reflection as sinister music plays. I can respect the reason for dropping an unsatisfactory effect but leaving the beat in just calls attention to its absence here.

The other big miss on this front, and an especially frustrating one, is in the movie’s third act – determined to eliminate the reborn Christ before he can be a threat to him, Damien commands his followers to effectively organize a mass act of infanticide across England. The sequence starts strong with Neill rallying his faithful in an effective performance. The problem is the follow through on that setup. For what’s a conceptually disturbing idea on several levels, the whole sequence mostly just feels lackluster in how it’s played. It's set up as a downright chilling moment with Damien’s speech, but the minimal tension in the actual murders, thrown in quick succession, makes the whole sequence feel less menacing and more ‘Let’s get this over with.’

"According to the studios, there probably won't be any more of these, so I say we go all in - let's kill some kids!"

Like Damien, I don’t really dislike this movie all in all. Again, I’ve seen it a few times before this, and there’s even elements of it I do feel work individually. The problem is, again, like Damien, I just don’t feel like the finished product comes together particularly well. I don’t want to simply come down on the directors on this, because it does sound like Fox primarily had them on for hired guns (in this case, this was director Graham Baker's first feature) and was mainly just trying to get these out there for the brand.

Which is frustrating, because these sequels both have flickers of potential to do some genuinely interesting things with this property, and even come close to really fostering those flickers into something more, but in the end, there’s just something about that first movie they never quite got back.

At least they got some things to be proud of out of them. After this, with Damien dead as the proverbial doornail, the series seemed to stop in its tracks for ten years. We’ll discuss its triumphant return next time with Omen IV: The Awakening…wait, what does that say? Made for TV sequel?!

…oooh dear.

Well, at least we still had some good times here, so let’s take another moment to treasure them.

After you’re done treasuring, follow me to the reading room for this movie’s round of Apocrypha, because while there’s more books to come, this will be our last page to screen comparison.

"I can't explain it to you now, but here - it's the novelization for this movie. It's a quick read and it will make a lot more sense of things."

And now we come to our final direct round of Apocrypha with our third author to step into the ring. Following Joseph Howard’s fleshed out, but more grounded take on the script to Damien: Omen II, Gordon McGill took the reins for this final installment, as well as two book-only sequels to come.

I’ll say this outright – like last time, this is honestly a case where the book, despite coming after, is better than the movie. I might even be inclined to argue The Final Conflict is a bit better a movie than Damien, but in both cases, the books put a lot more into the stories that the movies really need and for some reason just don’t have.

I’m also pleased with the fact McGill becomes the go-to man for the books from here on out. While I found Howard’s work on adapting Damien fine, I feel like McGill is the all in all best balance for these books and what they can offer that the movies don't. He has the same sense of what to build on and explore more that Howard brought previously, but he also brings in a good dash of Seltzer’s pulp horror that help give this entry some great wild touches along with a generally more thought out narrative.

The ambassador scene I mentioned before is a great example of this – in the movie, it literally is just the ambassador sees a dog, gets rattled, goes into his office and then blows his brains out. In the book, there’s a whole backstory of him being driven slowly mad by vivid nightmares of being chased by a skeletal jackal (hence the lost special effect) that finally sends him completely over the edge. This also has one of the pinnacles of pulp in this book as these nightmares, we’re told, frequently end with said skeleton jackal eating the ambassador’s penis – an occurrence that apparently happens enough in these nightmares the narration describes it as almost recognized routine.

Again, the pulp is back and this time it in the hands of an author that balances it with an overall better narrative. I mean, yeah, this isn’t gonna be high art – there’s a death scene in this that, while quick in the movie, is illustrated here in grisly detail that would do Lucio Fulci proud – but as a pulpy horror read, it delivers some good creepy, sometimes gruesome bits with a story that feels more thought out and developed than its screen counterpart in many regards.

For as much as I feel like the first Omen is underwhelming next to its film, I will reaffirm my other assertion from last time - the rest of this series reads better than it views. A point I will continue to argue near the end of the month when we come back to the McGill timeline one more time for his final two novels in the series Armageddon 2000 and The Abomination.

It’s gonna be a wild ride from here, and I’ll say this now – I’m having more fun with them than I expected I would.

But first, till next time when, again, we look at the less than successful Omen IV: The Awakening.

Till then.