The Omen & Feast

The Omen

I'm not one of these people who automatically objects to remakes. Most remakes don't have the capacity to tarnish their films of origin, and often different directors will have radically divergent takes on similar material. Martin Scorsese's The Departed and Andy Lau's Infernal Affairs are perfect examples of exactly this phenomenon - the same story filtered through two strikingly different perspectives, set halfway around the world from one another.

Though he admirably avoids Gus Van Sant's silly and insulting shot-for-shot remake style from Psycho, director John Moore nevertheless fails to give Richard Donner 1970's horror classic The Omen any kind of new spin or twist in his updated version. Aside from new actors and superficial, minor and unnecessary alterations, he's produced a carbon copy of the original film. Apparently, the only purpose behind the project for all involved was the strategic marketing opportunities of opening an Omen movie on 6/6/06.



Though it's a good film, Donner's original Omen isn't all that great. Certainly, it's not so perfect and tightly coiled an entertainment as to warrant this level of reverence. Having watche dthe film recently, I felt it paled in comparison to the other, similarly-themed great Domestic Horror films of its era - Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist.

David Seltzer's script, probably by studio mandate, keeps pretty much every plot element intact from the original version, good and bad. Ambassador Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber, deadpanning his way through Gregory Peck's old role) arrives at the hospital late one night to find that his baby has been stillborn and his wife Katherine (Julia Stiles, filling in for Lee Remick) has not yet been told. A creepy preist comes to him with a strange request: without telling Mrs. Thron, he wants Robert replace his dead child with another newborn infant whose mother died in childbirth.

Eventually, it becomes clear to Robert that something is wrong with this mysterious child, Damien (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick). The boy doesn't smile or speak much, doesn't play with other children, and seems to cause his nanny to commit suicide at a birthday party in some bizarre way. Those of us familiar with pop culture in any wayl, shape or form already know what's coming - Damien is the child of THE DEVIL! - which kind of hurts the film's chances of building suspense.

I've always had kind of a problem with the treatment of the Katherine character. In the dark about the film's central mystery for the entire running time, sidelined at about the halfway point so Robert can go have the actual adventure with a clever British photographer (David Thewlis), Katherine doesn't really have anything to do in the film. She has no compelling reason to exist, save the fact that someone needs to be Damien's mother for the story to work.

Why keep this silliness intact from one movie to the next? Why not eliminate the Thewlis character (played with a bit more spark and personality by David Warner in the '70s version) completely and send both Robert and Katherine on the voyage of discovery to find Damien's true origins? Wouldn't the entire purpose of doing a remake be to improve on some ill-conceived or dated aspects of the first film?

Moore tries to update the film's style, but none of his additions really enhance the storytelling in any significant way. He's added a few typical, desperate horror movie "scares," blaring loud music as something leaps out at the camera. Possibly in an attempt to give Stiles something to do during the first hour, he inserts a few "dream sequences" in which she gets brief glimpses of Damien's true nature. Unfortunately, none of these are scary because Moore identifies them as illusory too quickly, without letting any suspense build up. As soon as the viewer realizes that the scene isn't really hapepning - say, because everything's silent and bathed in soft white light save for Katherine's blood-red bathrobe - he or she can predict that some loud, shrill intrusion is going to interrupt the silence and give everyone who's not paying attention a jump.

By far, Moore's best decision was casting Mia Farrow as Damien's Satanic nanny, who guides the young Prince of Darkness on his ascension to world domination. She's the only one having fun in her role, not taking this ridiculous story about evil incarnate quite so seriously, remembering that people already know the story and are coming to the movie for goofy theatrics and spectacle. This isn't some earnest exploration of the nature of good and evil, Farrow's half-smirk and beady stares seems to indicate. It's a dark fairy tale, a morbid but ultimately fanciful vision of the end of the world filled with candles, whispered incantations, devil dogs and adorable but sinister little children.

That's why the best shot in both versions of the movie is also the most violent, when Donner and Moore let the pretension slip away for a few moments and actually make grisly, religious-themed horror films. A new remake was a chance to linger in that world for 90 minutes rather than just rehashing something mediocre from the past simply because it has a good hook and a famous title.

Feast

This is disappointing. As a big fan of the third season of "Project Greenlight," I was pulling for winning director John Gulager. You could tell from the TV episodes, aired several years ago already on Bravo, that the script by dorks Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton wasn't any good. Based solely on excerpts and dailies, it was clearly another jokey hodge-podge of horror cliches culled from older, better schlockfests.

But as obnoxious as I found Dunstan and Melton, and as much as their personalities indicated to me that I would dislike their writing, I had no idea just how desperate and misguided Feast really was conceptually until I watched the film this week. How could this have won a writing contest? It's enough material for maybe 1/4 of a real horror film.



Let's start with the premise: a group of strangers in a dive roadhouse are beseiged by an angry family of bloodthirsty monsters. Yawn. Dunstan and Melton have concocted no backstory or mythology for their monsters, who look for the vast majority of the film like walking deer corpses. (After about an hour of fast blurry shots of monsters, we're informed that they've been wearing animal carcasses this entire time, and actually look like toothy fish men.)

Even more problematically, they have not bothered to craft a single memorable character or a clever line of dialogue. Horror-comedy implies that there will be gory mayhem and humor in relatively equal doses. Feast has a lot of blood splatter, viscera and gross-out sequences, but very very little in the way of actual jokes or comedy. It's as if Dunstan and Melton find their premise so hilarious - MONSTERS! IN A DIVE BAR! AND THEY THROW UP ON GUYS! - they didn't feel like the script required anything other than action scenes and pointless arguments.

It's clearly not only a problem with ambition. The sense of humor exhibited in this film would be too juvenile for an Ace Ventura sequel. Compared to these guys, the Wayans Brothers are sophisticated cinematic auteurs. There's also a matter of authenticity. These guys are fanboy nerds. Why would they choose to set their script in a world of junkies, dropouts, alcoholics, bikers, ex-cons, actor Jason Mewes and other roadhouse types? Didn't anyone ever tell them "write what you know"? These guys have an affinity for composing dirtbag dialogue like I have an affinity for composing string concertos. They resort constantly to senseless strings of profanity, crudity or just plain old non-sequiteur.

A dizzying array of these stereotypical, uninteresting characters are introduced in the first few minutes. Gulager, channeling Guy Ritchie, pulls a freeze-frame on everyone's face and we get a lame comic dossier about that person flashed on the screen. It's fairly unnecessary, as we don't need to know anything about these people to enjoy watching them get disemboweled anyway, and none of the comments are particularly well-phrased or funny.

They do provide "life expectancy" estimates for each character, which I thought would be a clever, Vonnegut-inspired touch. It could have been a play on the very idea of building suspense in this kind of a slasher film, telling the audience the order in which the pawns will be killed. Alas, Gulager and his writers don't follow through on the joke by actually keeping true to these life expectancy predictions. Killing the characters in random order makes it just another pointless, unfunny digression among many.

Dunstan and Melton have clearly seen Deep Blue Sea, or at least that one infamous scene in which Samuel L. Jackson is eaten by a shark halfway through an inspirational monologue. So inspired are these two by that sequence, they have ripped it off half a dozen times in their own script. It sort of works the first time out. A character identified as "Hero" runs into the bar, tells everyone that a family of alien killers is en route and then, with Schwarzeneggerian flair, lets them know he intends to save their lives. Then he's brutally decapitated and devoured.

Ha ha!

Sure, it's ripped off from a Renny Harlin movie, but after the first five minutes of this shitkicker, I was prepared to enjoy any potential diversion or comic possibility I encountered to the maximum. Unfortunately, these guys make several return trips to this well. Repeatedly, characters stand up, take the mantle of new Group Leader only to be quickly killed. In fact, I'd say any time a character begins to speechify in Feast for any reason, causing everyone else in the bar to be quiet, it's a surefire sign of impending doom.

Repetition becomes an increasingly large problem as the film goes on. The basic scenario that drives the first 15 minutes just reiterates itself 5 or 6 times, until the film is over. Characters hear noises outside, someone gets attacked and eaten, then everyone panics and argues before one person steps forward to calm everyone down. Then everyone hears noises outside, that new leader character gets attacked and eaten, and everyone panics. And so on.

Though the film is embarrassingly bad, it's not really Gulager's fault. He does what he can with this atrocious script (which, if I remember the show correctly, was not thought too highly of by the director in the first place). Because he had such a brief production window and such limited resources, Gulager's final product does look cheaper and more amateurish than most horror features, even most direct-to-DVD horror features.

The aliens look cheap and fake, and Gulager intentionally quick-cuts around them, shoots them in motion or from a distance. Sometimes, he gets away with it, as when we watch from above as a girl falls to her gruesome death from the bar's second story. Other times, his movie looks like a student film. One scene finds the cast members narrating to the audience what the monsters are doing outside, off-camera.

"I think they're having sex now!"
"What's that?"
"It's a monster baby! Oh my God!"
"Oh, geez, if only you guys could all see this! It looks so cool!"

With luck, Dunstan and Melton won't work any more and can get back to writing their online "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" slash fiction or whatever, but I could see Gulager doing something else that wasn't so retarded and sophomoric. Apparently, he'd been directing for decades before being given a shot at the big time on reality TV, and it'd be a shame if all those years of preparation were derailed just because Matt Damon and Ben Affleck picked a ridiculously awful script for him to lens.