Recently, I took a look at the fourth Psycho movie and talked about the Psycho series in general. Today, we look at the Omen series, which is strikingly similar. Both franchises started with movies that could stand alone as some of the greatest horror films ever made. Both had surprisingly good early sequels, bland and pointless remakes, TV series… kinda, and fourth entries made directly for television. There is one major difference, though. Psycho IV: The Beginning is great. Omen 4: The Awakening is not.
What ties this movie to another bad sequel, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers? What series superstition plagued the production? And what future controversy was star Faye Grant involved in that nobody saw coming? Start collecting the Daggers of Megiddo as we look at… sigh… Omen 4: The Awakening.
We all know The Omen, right? Or at least the first one? It’s the other big Devil movie to come out of the 1970s alongside The Exorcist, even if it didn’t receive quite the same amount of Academy love. The Omen came out in 1976, starring Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, and the late, great David Warner. Richard Donner directed from a script and story by David Seltzer. The movie made a crazy amount of 1970s dollars, pulling in $78 million on a budget just under $3 million. It also received two Oscar nominations, both involving Jerry Goldsmith. He won for Best Original Score but lost Best Original Song. The score is a banger and remains one of the most enduring parts of the movie, let alone the entire series.
Of course, with results like that, we were going to get another one. Just two years later, Damien: The Omen II arrived on June 9, 1978. Starring William Holden, Lee Grant, and a young Lance Henriksen, the movie follows young Damien Thorne, who is now being raised by other family members while gradually learning who he really is: the Antichrist. It wasn’t the same critical or box-office darling as the original. It received no Oscar nominations and made around $35 million on a budget just under $7 million. Still, it was well received enough to keep mining the property.
Three years later came Omen III: The Final Conflict on March 20, 1981. The poster even called it “the final chapter of the Omen trilogy,” which is pretty important considering we’re talking about a fourth movie. Led by the ever-charismatic and sorely missed Sam Neill in one of his many horror showcases, The Final Conflict made around $20.5 million on a budget of $5 to $6 million. You’d think that would be the final nail in the coffin, or at least a nice bow on top of a solid trilogy.
Of course, the studio wasn’t about to let that happen.
Books based on The Omen had been published in 1976, 1978, and 1980 to coincide with the first three movies, but the novels continued after the trilogy. The fourth movie was supposed to be based on the fourth book, Omen 4: Armageddon 2000, which came out in 1982. There were even plans for a fifth movie based on the fifth novel, Omen V: The Abomination, released in 1985.
The original fourth Omen movie was due to come out in 1984, with Graham Baker returning to direct after the third installment. Unfortunately, Baker was held up making a movie called Impulse, and his replacement, Horace D. Burton, died suddenly in 1983. 20th Century Fox canceled the project entirely. At least until 1991.
With another famed horror franchise, Psycho, making a fourth entry and bringing it to television, Fox decided it was time to call up Satan again and bring back The Omen. The studio flirted with a theatrical release, but the failures of The Guardian and The Exorcist III helped convince them that a television movie was the better option. The plan was actually for Omen 4: The Awakening to launch a series of TV sequels.
Then the movie came out. That plan was scrapped.
Producer Harvey Bernhard, who had helped produce the previous three movies, claimed he could make a $4 million movie look like a $16 million movie. Spoiler: he couldn’t.
Bernhard also believed they could still release the movie theatrically even after Fox had decreed that it would be made for television. He was at least right about that part, as Omen 4: The Awakening eventually received theatrical releases in Australia and the United Kingdom. It doesn’t deserve it.
The movie tries to continue the story of the Antichrist being resurrected, but it ends up feeling more like a remake. It takes standout ideas and deaths from the first three movies, recreates them, and stitches everything together from a collection of standalone scenes. It’s also the only movie in the series that doesn’t actually include Damien, aside from a plot-device mention.
The movie has two credited directors, which is rarely a good sign. The director who started the production, the one they actually chose, was none other than Dominique Othenin-Girard, the man who almost completely ruined Michael Myers with Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. People were impressed by his 1985 movie After Darkness, but I don’t see myself hunting down anything he did after this one.
What’s crazy is that Othenin-Girard left after only a couple of weeks because of creative differences with the producer. Who knows what kind of shenanigans and crazy plot points we would have gotten if he had stayed?
His replacement was actor/director Jorge Montesi. Montesi was almost exclusively a television director, with dozens of credits spread across episodic TV and made-for-TV movies, along with some direct-to-video work like Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal. No offense to the guy, but this looks like a TV movie.
Bernhard couldn’t make it look like a big-budget movie, but that’s probably because he chose the wrong studio, network, and people. Psycho IV looks like it could have been a theatrical affair because they spent the money on a good writer and director in Mick Garris, a strong cinematographer, and solid performances from the cast.
The writers on this movie include poor David Seltzer, whose name gets dragged into this based on the awesome characters he created for the first film. Producer Bernhard also received a story credit alongside Brian Taggart, who wrote the screenplay. Taggart is better than this. Full stop. His contributions to film and horror far outweigh what he put out here. Throughout the 1980s, he gave us scripts for Visiting Hours, Of Unknown Origin, V, The New Kids, Wanted: Dead or Alive, and Poltergeist III, among others.
The cast has some interesting names, with Oscar nominee Michael Lerner not only being the best actor brought on board but easily the best part of the whole flick.
Faye Grant and Michael Woods play Karen and Gene York, who adopt the young and very evil Delia, played by Asia Vieira. Smaller roles from Megan Leitch, who plays Mulder’s sister on The X-Files, and Don S. Davis, who plays Scully’s dad on The X-Files, round out a solid if very obviously made-for-TV cast.
Everyone here had larger or recurring roles on television, but the oddest standout is Faye Grant for something she certainly never wanted. Years later, Grant helped expose her then-husband Stephen Collins as a child predator by releasing tapes recorded during their marriage counseling in which he admitted exposing himself to minors.
I don’t completely blame the cast, as they did what they could with what they were given, but the movie did none of them any favors.
The movie was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was hit with the classic Omen curse. There were no plane crashes or production-related deaths this time, but the shoot was delayed when three of the worst blizzards ever recorded hit the city back-to-back-to-back.
There were on-set accidents, too. A stuntman was injured after falling 15 feet into a dumpster and hitting his knee. Then a fire during the psychic fair scene got out of control and burned the entire set down, apparently creating a mushroom cloud over Vancouver.
And then there was the weird stuff. Two snake handlers told the producers they would allow themselves to be bitten by non-defanged venomous rattlesnakes for $5,000 per bite. They had the antidote nearby, and what we see on screen is the snakes actually biting those crazy handlers. That’s dedication to the bit.
As I said, the movie itself struggles. It mostly remixes old concepts and does them poorly compared to the previous films. And while the movie is only 97 minutes long, it somehow feels like the longest movie in the series.
It opens with Congressman Gene York and his wife, Karen, deciding to adopt a child after being unable to conceive one themselves. They find what they hope is their answer at a nunnery, where everything immediately feels off and Sister Yvonne is terrified of the baby.
Events start happening as they do in these movies. The baby scratches Karen. The preacher responsible for the baptism has a heart attack. Then things slow down and nothing particularly strange happens for a while. The Yorks eventually adopt a Rottweiler after it saves their adopted daughter Delia’s life.
Their doctor tells them Delia is showing signs of sociopathy, but she has also already begun menstruating, which could explain some of her unusual behavior because of how rare that is at such a young age.
Then we get the new-age healer nanny, whose chakras are all kinds of thrown off by Delia. A photograph reveals strange colors and energy surrounding the girl. When they take her to a telepath fair, all of the psychics immediately sense her negative energy and bad vibes. It’s this movie’s version of the zoo animals going crazy around Damien, except worse and dumber. Especially when the entire place burns down.
The nanny discovers exactly what Delia is, but she is thrown out of a window at the very top of the house and dies on a child’s plaything below. Bad news. Good news. Karen faints from the shock and is taken to the hospital, where she discovers that she is pregnant.
Eight months later, she learns about the Antichrist and realizes how many similarities there are between her situation and what happened in the previous Omen movies. She hires a private detective to find out who Delia’s real parents were. Enter Michael Lerner.
From his very first scene, Lerner is charismatic, fun, and puts on a clinic compared to the other actors. His character, Earl, is easily the best thing in the movie. He heads to the orphanage and uses the old clown-decoy technique, you know, the one we all use in our day-to-day lives, to find some files after the nuns refuse to give him the information he wants.
He also finds Sister Yvonne, who has naturally switched religions to one where you hang out with sweaty preachers and handle venomous animals. He shows her a picture of Delia, which upsets the snakes. They bite and kill her.
Earl can’t make it back to Karen, so he mails her his findings. And while we’re here, let’s talk about his death scene, because it’s probably the best and most Omen-like scene in the entire movie.
The movie tries to emulate the better parts of the previous entries constantly: the nanny falling out the window, the Rottweiler, the photograph with strange markings, and the little girl giving evil looks like Damien. Earl’s death actually works.
He mails the documents to Karen when he is stranded by bad weather and is clearly disturbed by what he has discovered. That’s another example of why Lerner is the best actor here. He walks through the city with some snacks, passes a store, and sees a toy crane in the window.
At about an hour and 17 minutes into the movie, we get its best shot. Earl watches the toy crane with a smile that slowly fades into dread. The foreshadowing is killer. Pun intended.
The made-for-TV budget takes away some of the impact, but they clearly tried to recreate the David Warner decapitation scene from the first Omen. They don’t quite pull it off.
Earl then passes a baby Jesus manger in another window. The scene goes from serene to terrifying as the baby in the middle transforms from baby Jesus into a mix of a C.H.U.D. offspring and the little tyke from It’s Alive.
Startled, Earl wanders around and is stalked by a religious caroling cover band doing their best Jerry Goldsmith impression. He runs until he reaches a construction site. Frozen in terror, he sees something approaching. At first, I was mad at the scene. Then I remembered the priest from the first movie waiting an entire calendar month for the top of a church to impale him.
Earl is obliterated by a wrecking ball. The open mouth and flying dummy are pretty silly, but I do give them credit for having the wrecking ball appear in the reflection of his eye. That’s cool.
With the best part of the movie killed off, we might as well finish the last 16 minutes.
Karen learns that her doctor was in on everything and that her unborn child is actually the new Son of Satan. She kills him with a scalpel, which is an appropriate horror-movie death for a doctor. She then decides to take out Delia. Karen also learns about Earl’s death in an unintentionally funny scene where information is given way too willingly.
She kills the new nanny, who is just another in a long line of Antichrist protectors. The final confrontation… wait, no, that’s the previous movie… takes place with Karen going after her son and adopted daughter. She discovers the Mark of the Beast, the good old triple sixes, on her son’s hand. It’s hilarious that she never noticed it before.
When Karen tries to kill Delia, the evil power of her baby forces the gun against her. The movie then quick-cuts to her funeral.
I’m still unsure whether the father was in on everything or not, even after watching this thing twice. I fell asleep about halfway through the first time.
The widowed father of two walks away from his wife’s grave as a bargain-bin Omen soundtrack plays. And this mishmash of better ideas finally comes to an end.
Even though Omen 4: The Awakening was supposed to reignite the series and potentially launch a run of made-for-TV sequels, none of that happened. This ended up being the last movie produced by Harvey Bernhard. The next Omen movie wouldn’t arrive for another 15 years, when the 2006 remake came to theaters with a really solid cast and disappointed anyway.
Before that, though, there was the rarely mentioned 1995 attempt at a TV series that ultimately became a TV movie. Directed by Jack Sholder, it had a fun cast that included William Sadler, Chelsea Field, Brett Cullen, Steven Williams, and Julie Carmen.
There was also Damien, a TV series that lasted one season in 2016.
Then we had to wait until The First Omen to get another genuinely solid film in the franchise.
As it stands, Omen 4: The Awakening just kinda exists. The little floppy collection on Blu-ray that I have doesn’t even include it. It goes 1, 2, 3, remake. The Shout! Factory collection from a few years ago does include it, but to what end? It’s cleaned up, and there’s an interview with the screenwriter, but the best thing on the disc may just be the retrospective on the Omen films as a whole.
It’s hard to give this movie a pass when Psycho IV did something similar just a year earlier and succeeded so much more effectively. Omen 4 feels cheaper, has worse performances, and was made for a network that didn’t allow what horror fans crave. The Omen series isn’t even known for excessive gore or nudity, but if you’re going to make a movie designed to restart the series, why not go big?
I’d say it’s worth watching, but only if you feel like you need to complete everything in the franchise. This awakening should go back to sleep.
A couple of previous episodes of this show can be seen below. For more, check out the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel—and don’t forget to subscribe!