Bad Omens

I started watching the 2006 re-make of The Omen on TV, partly because I thought the boy was cute and partly because I couldn't believe it was anything like as bad as it was supposed to be. Well, the boy is nice. He's got blue eyes, at least. Apart from that though he's no great improvement on the boy in the original. For all that individually they do nothing but change, boys as a generality are essentially changeless and timeless.

Everything else, of course, does change - at least in the sense that things in general naturally decay and degenerate. And so the Omen franchise started out well, carried on being entertaining with its first sequel and then clearly lost its way. This evening indeed it wasn't long before I was longing for all the things, large and small, that made the original a classic. Where was Patrick Troughton as the priest? Where was Gerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score? Where was the deft, spooky direction of Richard Donner? Where was Gregory Peck, for that matter? Liev Schreiber (however his name is supposed to be pronounced) actually seems like a perfectly serious, competent actor, utterly baffled here by a director who doesn't have a clue. But what's with the bizarre, unfunny in-joke of having Mia Farrow as the evil nanny? In fact, what's with the unfunny in-joke of the whole sodding thing? At one point I was even pining for Guildford Cathedral. (Well, I do pass it every day on my way to work!)

At 10 o'clock then, I gave up and switched over to the News. (The new President of America is of course a good deal scarier than anything Hollywood could come up with nowadays.) So for all I know they might have changed the ending. But I don't really care. I mean, who did they expect to watch this rubbish? People who thought the original was so good that there really ought to be shit version just to balance things out? Perhaps you're supposed to watch this version first, so that all the gruesome accidental killings (which are all exactly the same in this one, except that they aren't actually frightening) won't be quite as exciting when you watch the old version!

The sad thing of course is that the original Omen is not that great. Yes, it's spooky enough to entertain, but it lacks the theological and political authenticity that it would have needed genuinely to get under the skin. Compared with this slick, modern, whole-heartedly fantastical version, the 1970s original has a kind of unnerving gritty realism - even the bits that are noticeably stagey and Pinewoody. (Was it actually filmed at Pinewood? Dunno!) The new version's problem is that follows the conventions of modern Hollywood to the letter, never deviating towards the real world in the slightest.

To take just a couple of examples, Patrick Troughton's priest in the original wore a clerical suit. Why? Well, that's how Roman Catholic priests in the 1970s dressed - or at least the more old-fashioned ones in the English-speaking world did. Similarly, of course, Guildford Cathedral back then was clearly considered a very normal modern church (i.e. normal for people who still went to church). In the new version, Pete Postlethwaite's hammy, not to say pantomime replacement wears a soutane and a Romano hat. Why? Because that's what proper Catholic priests wear in proper horror movies! (Don't you know anything?) And of course in an age when people only go to church to get married and buried, and when churches only appear on celluloid in gangster flicks and horror movies, you've got to have a proper gothic church with pointy bits and everything. That's how it goes.

Bearing such details in mind though, it quickly becomes clear why nothing in this film feels remotely realistic - let alone frightening. The first rule of any ghost story, let alone of a horror movie, is that there has to be at least the conceit that the events described or portrayed actually took place - or could actually take place. Both Frankenstein and Dracula, after all, were epistolary novels, purporting to relay real events, and the reason why the Francis Ford Coppola movie versions of the 1990s failed to thrill and chill was because they bore no relation whatsoever to the imaginary real worlds described in their source materials.

The problem with this new re-make of The Omen is that the only world it does resemble is the imaginary world that most modern movies are set in. For example there's one scene in the film that's set in a zoo: it may well, for all I can remember, have been in the original (my mind plays tricks), but here it feels curiously like an homage to the opening of the first Harry Potter film. And that imaginary Chris Columbus version of reality, in which English schoolboys all wear caps (and according to which American kids in the late 1980s still dressed in the same clothes their parents wore at their age in the 1950s) is about as near to reality as this movie-world gets.

Hollywood's big problem is that its movies are all about the Hollywood version of reality. Its horror movies aren't remotely frightening because they've got nothing to do with us, in the real world. Are we really to wonder that fewer and fewer people seem to want to watch any of Hollywood's modern output - with the exception of its out and out fantasty stuff, which (naturally enough) it actually does reasonably well?

And should we not worry that it is now the darlings and luvvies of Hollywood (led, apparently, by the clownish George Clooney) who, with their brainless puppet President now safely installed in Washington, will be calling the shots in the "real world" for the next four (possibly eight!) years?