The Omen (1976)

Directed by Richard Donner. Starring Gregory Peck, David Warner, Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw, Patrick Troughton, Martin Benson, Harvey Spencer Stephens, Leo McKern. [R]

Note to parents: if you have the option of adopting a child that was born at 6 AM on the sixth day of the sixth month of the year, maybe wait for the next one? Doing otherwise carries a great risk of overjoyed hangings, impaled priests, baboon hysteria, tricycle mishaps, and decapitations. Or so this movie claims, a substantively coarse but cinematically slick horror movie clearly intended as “The Exorcist for the popcorn crowd.” After ambassador Peck’s wife (Remick) loses her child at birth, he decides to swap it with another recently delivered child from a deceased mother with no family, little realizing that the kid is the son of Beelzebub (the fact that mama was a jackal should have been a tip-off that, in the words of Hank Hill, “that boy ain’t right”). It’s all quite silly, of course, but undeniably entertaining all the same, delivering enough shocks and (unintended?) laughs to hold interest even when it submerges into biblical quotations and ecclesiastical conspiracies. Oscar winner for Jerry Goldsmith’s score, a rare exception to the Academy’s unwritten rule not to reward music that constantly repeats “Hail, Satan!” in Latin. Followed by three sequels and a 2006 remake.

73/100