And while we're on the subject of bad movies (she said, as if she were ever on any other subject at all), I have to wonder here if I'm the only person in the entire world who actually likes
Omen III: The Final Conflict. And from what I can see, it's entirely possible that I am.
Who could resist a movie with a fox hunt? I ask you. The Final Conflict did well when it came out in 1981--it made twenty million dollars in its theatrical release, about half as much as the first Friday the 13th movie made the year before--but those profits still show a twenty percent decrease from Damien: Omen II, released in 1978, and a two hundred percent decrease from the first film, which came out in 1976. It must have been clear to the studios that the wave of seventies Satan movies was over, and The Final Conflict was essentially the last gasp of an already dying subgenre. Ten years before, however, it had been an entirely different story.
Who can deny the allure of Satan movies in a seventies world? My vampirism class watched clips from
The Omega Man today, and it's basically the same conceit: the staid white middle-class male defends himself against the tide of happening, multiracial vampires, who have a great time dancing in the street while he plays chess with a bust of General MacArthur. (We also watched some of
I Am Legend, which I hadn't seen before and which I kind of loved, apart from the CGI, which was all over the damn place and none of it very good. That the original and far more morally ambiguous ending was deemed unsuitable for theatrical release also speaks volumes, I think, about the political climate in which we live.)
Joan Didion defined the night of the Manson murders--of Roman Polanski's pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, among others--as the night the sixties ended, and it also seems to have been the night the Satan movies started (although the first tremors, eerily enough, can be attributed to Polanski's
Rosemary's Baby). The seventies were lousy with Satanism, at least at the multiplex, namely
The Exorcist and the
Omen series, and the the dozens of imitators that came nipping at their heels. We can easily see the appetite for these films as indicative of white middle-class America's fears of the times they lived in, which were, indeed, a-changin'--movies about Satanism, about the Antichrist, allowed them to firmly align themselves with the staid and the good, while looking at the Other--black power, free love, radical feminism, drugs, protest, and this new music called "rock" and "roll"--as belonging to the kingdom of Satan. This is not to say that middle-class, middle-aged America thought of the younger generation as evil, exactly, just that this kind of binary opposition is always comforting, especially when you can align yourself with the good. The Manson murders served as the catalyst that allowed Americans to exorcise (so to speak) their fears of the dark side of social change, and reconfirm all their deepest beliefs: priests are good, Ouija boards are gateways to hell, and British kids are totally fucking scary.
Seriously. By 1981, however, the fears of the Seventies were a thing of the past (or at least they seemed to be). Carter was out, Reagan was in, gas prices had stabilized, the Iran hostage crisis was all but forgotten, America was rocking the junta in Nicaragua, and money was everywhere. Teenagers no longer cared about getting peace, freedom and equality so much as they cared about getting their MTV, and, perhaps most importantly, the most profitable horror movies of the decade were aimed not at worried parents but at teenagers themselves. (But that's another story, and will be told another time.)
Even if the time had been right for it, The Final Conflict would not have been a very good movie. I know this the same way I know that sugar free Red Bull is probably eating through my intestines like sulfuric acid as I type these words--and yet that knowledge doesn't stop me from drinking it. Nor does the fact that The Final Conflict is pretty awful keep me from thinking that I wouldn't mind watching it again, and probably would if I had a copy of it at my disposal. It's a bad movie, but it's a fun-bad movie, and that's really all I need.
But you probably want to know more than that. (And if you don't, well: too bad.) First of all, it's one of those movies that ends up seeming much longer than it is, and though it has a couple of genuinely scary moments (including the fantastically gruesome death scene we've all come to expect from the brains behind the Omen movies--and this time it's the death of a priest, no less) it's on the whole too meandering to be really scary, and it never gets under your skin (unlike the first Omen, which was by no means a great movie but still had a handful of moments that stayed in your memory long after it was over. Sometimes, that's really all you need). I don't really know if it's better or worse than Damien: Omen II, which I found absolutely, gruelingly boring. I felt the same way about the fourth and fifth installments of the Halloween series: I know Halloween 5 is probably way, way worse than Halloween 4, but it's also way more entertaining. I don't think The Final Conflict is really, really bad, exactly; it's just that it attempts a lot more than Damien, and pretty much fails to achieve any of it. You can see, however, what it tried to do, and what it tried to do is really pretty admirable: to actually explore the nature of good and evil, to present an interesting main character, and to jam in a badass fox hunt scene. (And the fox hunt scene, may I add, really does come off as pretty badass.)
So what has the movie got going for it? Well, Damien, for one. Whereas in the previous two movies Damien was (A.) An almost entirely nonverbal five-year-old and (B.) An annoying seventh-grader (somehow evil has less of an impact when it's presented in the form of a thirteen-year-old boy, perhaps because we naturally assume all thirteen-year-old boys to be sociopaths), Damien is now a charismatic businessman and politician--and best of all, he's played by someone who can actually, well, act. How this movie managed to sign on Sam Neill to the role--even if he was at the beginning of his career--is beyond me, and his performance is what makes the movie watchable. He plays the tortured villain role he'd later hone to perfection in The Piano, and has, among other things, a scene in which he "prays," to the approaching second-coming:
Nazarene, charlatan, what can you offer humanity? Since the hour you vomited forth from the gaping wound of a woman, you have done nothing but drown man's soaring desires in a deluge of sanctimonious morality. You've inflamed the pubertal mind of youth with your repellent dogma of original sin. And now you absolve in denying them the ultimate joy beyond death by destroying me ? But you will fail, Nazarene, as you have always failed. We were both created in man's image, but while you were born of an impotent god, I was conceived of a jackal. Born of Satan, the desolate one. Your pain on the cross was but a splinter compared to the agony of my father. Cast out of heaven, the fallen angel, banished, reviled. I will drive deeper the thorns into your rancid carcass, you profaner of vices. Cursed Nazarene. Satan, I will avenge thy torment, by destroying the Christ forever.
It's somewhat thought provoking, if not nearly as thought provoking as it probably hopes to be, but the point is that it tries. Now, in the real world, you can probably ignore movies that fail to acheive the goals they set for themselves. But when you watch horror movies, you see so many that just shuffle through the motions, as if they're saying "okay, boobs, boobs, pot, separate, kill, a really bad song, uh, machete, uh, can I just go home now?" that, when a movie comes along and actually tries to do something, it's like teaching a second-grade class full of average but ridiculously underacheiving students, and suddenly getting a dyslexic, hyperactive, wildly imaginative student who decides to retell Moby-Dick in comic book form. You just can't help but clap your hands in glee.
And lastly, maybe my favorite thing about this damn movie: Jerry Goddamn Goldsmith. What he lacks in subtlety he makes up for in fantastic glittery triumphant crescendoes, and man, I love those things. The music in this movie is about eight times better than the movie itself. I also noticed, while I was watching it, that the soundtrack uncannily resembled the music in The Secret of NIMH; I looked it up, and of course Goldsmith scored that movie, too, the very next year. So there you have it: I probably like this movie entirely because I fell in love with a movie about hyperintelligent rats when I was in second grade.
But there are worse reasons, I suppose.
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