Final warning: Don't see 'Omen'

The original 1976 "The Omen," you may recall, was a classy horror movie starring Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as a middle-aged American diplomat and his wife who discover that their strange but much-loved little boy, Damien, is the Antichrist.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE OMEN

DIRECTOR: John Moore

CAST: Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles, Mia Farrow

RUNNING TIME: 110 minutes

RATING: R for disturbing violent content, graphic images and some language

WHERE: Alderwood 7, Bella Bottega 11, Bellevue Galleria 11, Parkway Plaza 12, Cinema 17, East Valley 13, Factoria 8, Galaxy Monroe 12, Gateway 8, Kent Station 14, Meridian 16, Metro, Mountlake 9, Valley Drive-In, Woodinville 12

GRADE: C-

Part of a cycle of expensive movies about demonic possession that included "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist," the film was a huge hit in its time and spawned three sequels, "Damien: Omen II" and "The Final Conflict" and, for television, "Omen IV: The Awakening."

And this remake, which is having an odd Tuesday opening to take publicity advantage of it being 6/6/06 (get it?), is amazingly faithful to that legacy -- so unchanged from its source that original writer David Seltzer has been given sole screenplay credit.

Also in its favor, the film offers a truly delicious comeback role for Rosemary herself, Mia Farrow, who is so chillingly believable as a sweet-talking nanny from hell (literally) that it makes you have a few kind thoughts for Woody Allen.

Even so, despite this performance, and despite the film's steely fidelity and insistence on playing it straight -- without a lot of razzle-dazzle special effects -- the revisited "Omen" is neither very scary nor much fun in a movie-movie sense.

New director John Moore just doesn't have original director Richard Donner's filmmaking flair, so the same scenes done the same way on phony-looking Prague locations without the benefit of Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score just seem terminally slow and flat.

At the same time, Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles are hardly suitable replacements for the original's A-list marquee, while lowering the hero's age by two decades (for audience demographic purposes) gives us a 30-year-old U.S. ambassador to England. Yeah, right.

But the fatal flaw of this new "Omen" is the fact that time has not been kind to its concept. With a straight face, the story line asks us to accept the most backward superstition of Catholic mythology, and to root for a man to kill his own child because God demands it of him.

Now that the world is full of people drunk with religious superstition who are out to kill those that they perceive to be "evil" because God demands it of them, this movie loses its ability to thrill us, and just seems another distasteful part of the problem.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com.