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Saturday night, after getting my taxes completed and filed, and despite the late showtime I finally managed to get out and see The First Omen a prequel to the 1976 horror film The Omen.

20th Century Studios

Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) a young American Nun is transferred to a Catholic orphanage in Rome. There she discovers that the orphanage conceals a dark and terrible secret concerning the coming of the antichrist.

I am a fan of the original film The Omen just as I am a fan of The Exorcist despite being a non-believer myself. And just as with The Exorcist the squeal to The Omen have had little attraction to me most often possessing intercepting ideas that are not quite executed well enough being secondary to shock and jump scares. Sadly, The First Omen, in addition to violating canon, something that was evident in the trailers, fails to commit itself to either the nihilism of the original or shake itself free of aping sequences from its classic progenitor.

In The Omen, while it stands on shaky theological ground, the focus of its theme was clear, a clear acceptance of Christian theology in particular the Book of Revelations and the ending of the world. The writers of The First Omen seem to shy away from such concrete convictions. Instead that place into the mouths of their devote characters prosaic and petty motivations for their conspiracy. This has the double effect of making their goals far less threatening and undercutting the ultimate stakes at play.

The First Omen is competently crafted, and Arkasha Stevenson’s direction is quite well executed. The cast which includes Charles Dance and Bill Nighy are all very good and turn in credible performances. I was distracted by Mark Kroven’s score which neither paid sufficient homage to Jerry Goldsmith’s outstanding original score nor did it stand on its own enough to be compelling in its own right.

While this review may seem harsh it is because I had hoped for better. The First Omen is simply a middling film, not as terrible as some of the sequels that preceded it or as brainless as many horror films but neither did it achieve anything nor seem to have anything interesting to say. Immaculate is the far better evil nuns and church conspiracy film this year.