The Omen

Julia Stiles, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick and Liev Schreiber.

Herald rating: * *

Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby in 1968 set the benchmark for devil movies. William Friedkin's wonderful film The Exorcist followed five years later and the highest of many low points that followed was The Omen, which was made in 1976 and spawned several sequels - one with Sam Neill.

This is a remake, not quite shot-for-shot but scene-for-scene, using a script by the same writer. It adds little but sound and special effects fury to the mix and it's depressing to watch such a good cast (Thewlis, Gambon and Postlethwaite in particular) struggling with clunker lines.

The story revolves around a baby switch by which the wife (Stiles) of the American ambassador to England (Schreiber) gets to raise the son of Old Nick himself. After five years of fixed staring in which he utters only one sentence ("They are scared" as he looks at a cage of gibbering monkeys) his mother begins to wonder whether something's not right.

All the improbabilities survive - ambassadors don't go house-hunting or take off from work for days at a time - but the main problem is that it's virtually devoid of suspense. Rosemary's Baby worked so well because of Polanski's teasing restraint; the atmosphere of much of the film was innocent, even joyful, and he kept delaying the moment when he confirmed our worst fears. This Omen, by contrast, pitches us in at the deep end and the bad little bastard (Davey-Fitzpatrick) is too obviously diabolical from the first few minutes; director Moore prefers the in-your-face approach.

The use of Farrow (the mother of Rosemary's Baby) as a malevolent Mary Poppins type has a nice dramatic charge but the film as a whole is too heavy on its feet and the implication that events such as September 11 and Katrina are the devil's work is an exploitative touch that borders on the offensive. It's ponderous and humourless and not very scary.

CAST: Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber, Mia Farrow, David Thewlis, Pete Postlethwaite, Michael Gambon, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick
DIRECTOR: John Moore
RATING: R16, contains violence, offensive language and horror
RUNNING TIME: 110 minutes
SCREENING: Berkeley, Hoyts, Village