We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Evil kids, Yetis, and modern chills.
OMEN IV: THE AWAKENING (1991)
Over the course of three films, the makers of the Omen movies were building up to the apocalypse, telling the story of Antichrist foretold in the pages of the last chapter of the Bible, Revelation. But while Revelation was a vision of the end of the world, the filmmakers walked it back and had the Antichrist get killed off at the end of the third movie. He didn’t accomplish near as much as Revelation said he would. So what do you do when you’re making a series about the rise of the Antichrist but you’ve killed off the character? Well, the answer is, of course, that you start the process all over again.
As it turns out, the Antichrist named Damien Thorn had fathered a child before he died. A baby girl that’s adopted by legislator (and soon to be congressman) Gene York, played by Michael Woods, and his attorney wife Karen, played by Faye Grant. They name the girl – primarily played by Asia Vieira in the film – Delia... and as they raise Delia, strange things start to happen around her. It begins with trouble at the St. Francis Orphanage, where Delia was before the adoption. As soon as they get the baby home, she scratches Karen on the face and that scratch gets infected. People associated with Delia die in strange accidents, or from mysterious afflictions. The New Age nanny that Karen hires suspects there’s something off about the kid – and soon, Karen starts to feel the same way. So she hires a private investigator, Michael Lerner as Earl Knight, to dig into Delia’s post-adoption history and unearth the truth about her parentage.
Harvey Bernhard, who produced the previous Omen movies and received story credit on the second one, crafted the script for this sequel with Brian Taggert with the intention that it would lead to more sequels. Delia isn’t the new Antichrist herself, but she is here to pave the way for Damien Thorn’s proper replacement, who enters the picture by the time Omen IV wraps up. Oddly, the first choice to direct this movie was Dominique Othenin-Girard, who had just delivered the least popular Michael Myers movie in the Halloween franchise (up to that point, anyway), Halloween 5. But even though Halloween fans weren’t pleased with him, Othenin-Girard landed this job... then quit partway through production and was replaced by veteran TV director Jorge Montesi. And it’s fitting that Montesi had TV experience, because this was a TV movie that made its debut on Fox.
Bernhard and Taggert were aided in the scripting process by the fact that Omen IV: The Awakening is sort of a remake of the first movie, following its basic structure and featuring a lot of similar scenes. They just had to take what was in The Omen and twist it just enough to make it a bit different. They didn’t do too bad of a job. While Omen IV is generally looked down upon, it does manage to have some creepy sequences despite the made-for-TV vibe, and Grant delivers a good performance as the mother who gradually becomes terrified of her daughter. It may not live up to the first two movies, but I’d much rather watch this than the third movie.
Still, the negative reception was enough to make sure the Omen franchise went dormant for many years.
THE FRONT ROOM (2024)
Since making his feature directorial debut with The Witch, Robert Eggers has earned a large, appreciative fanbase... and with The Front Room, it was time for his brothers Max and Sam Eggers to shine. Working from a story by Susan Hill, the Eggers brothers made their feature directorial debut with this unnerving psychological drama that stars singer Brandy as anthropology professor Belinda, who has become pregnant for the second time after her first child was stillborn. This makes Belinda especially worried about how this pregnancy is going to go... and circumstances around her do not make it any easier.
Belinda is married to Norman (Andrew Burnap), an exceptionally useless character who is too focused on his work to have much personality when he’s at home. When Norman’s father passes away, Belinda and Norman discover that his stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter) has left a large amount of money to them in her Will – but they’ll only get this money if they allow her to move in with them. The tagline for this movie is “All Hell Moves In,” which is a fitting description for what it’s like when Solange sets herself up in Belinda and Norman’s place. This woman is extremely unpleasant – and Hunter does an incredible job making sure Solange is an off-putting and irritating as possible. She’s a nasty schemer who is clearly up to something, and while Belinda butts heads with her, Norman continues to be a useless observer.
Aside from her role in the slasher I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, I have never paid much attention to Brandy’s career, but I was impressed by her acting in this movie. Belinda and the audience are stuck in this situation together, having to deal with Solange’s nastiness, and it’s easy to side with her every step of the way. Hunter is doing some award-worthy work in this movie, and Brandy does well while sharing many scenes with her.
Genre fans who turn to The Front Room looking for pure horror, which is how it was marketed, will likely be disappointed, but Solange certainly is creepy.
THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957)
Although I have been a horror fan for nearly forty years now, the output of the highly respected genre company Hammer Films is still largely a blind spot for me... but in recent years, I have been working to fix that. I have watched the Hammer Dracula movies, their Mummy movies, The Quatermass Xperiment, and X the Unknown – and now I can add The Abominable Snowman to the checklist. Going into this creature feature, I was excited to see how Hammer was going to handle a story about the Abominable Snowman, which is also known as the Yeti. Unfortunately, the excitement quickly drained out of me as I witnessed the movie director Val Guest and writer Nigel Kneale had delivered.
Peter Cushing stars as Dr. John Rollason (Peter Cushing), a British botanist, who disregards the concerns expressed by his wife and decides to join a climbing expedition led by American adventurer Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker) to search for the legendary Yeti. This is a decision he comes to regret, because Friend is looking to capture a Yeti as part of his quest to achieve fame and fortune, and he is so relentless in this pursuit that he’ll even purposely put other members of the expedition in mortal danger in an effort to lure out a Yeti. This sounds like the set-up for a good time, but I actually found this movie to be a rather slow climb that often left me sitting there, waiting for something interesting happen.
For me, the slow burn generated more restlessness than tension, and I got tired of watching the members of the expedition do so much chatting with each other. Peter Cushing is great, as always, but not even his presence could keep this movie interesting when the Yetis were absent. Which is the majority of the running time.
The Abominable Snowman feels like a missed opportunity. So much more could have been done with the idea of explorers searching for Yetis and getting more than they bargained for when they actually do cross paths with the creatures. But the film's glacial pace and lack of incident make it somewhat tedious.
IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE (2024)
It’s What’s Inside is one of those movies where every recommendation comes with the warning that you should go into this movie knowing as little about it as possible – which is advice I usually end up being glad that I followed. This was one of those cases, as I avoided (most) spoilers about It’s What’s Inside and went into it not really knowing what sort of ride it was going to take me on. The ride turned out to be intriguing and very entertaining.
Written and directed by Greg Jardin, the film follows unhappy couple Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and Cyrus (James Morosini) to a party being thrown by their friend Reuben (Devon Terrell) at his late mother’s crumbling mansion. Several of their old school friends are there, including online influencer Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who Shelby and Cyrus both have unhealthy obsessions with... but that’s not the only problem. There’s an incident in the past that involves their pal Forbes (David W. Thompson) that sounds like the set-up for a slasher revenge story. This isn’t a slasher, but things do take a turn for the weird when Forbes pulls out a briefcase that contains a device he has been working on.
This has been described as a horror movie as well as a sci-fi movie and a comedy, and while it’s a blend of all of those genres, horror comes through less than the other two. It’s clear from early on that something is going to go terribly in this situation, and it certainly does, but while the certainty that things are going to fall apart is enough to keep you on the edge of your seat, Jardin is more focused on getting laughs and digging into the character drama which is intensified by the sci-fi device at the center of the story.
It’s What’s Inside is a lot of fun and well worth checking out – just do so without any genre expectations and go along with the journey Jardin wants to take you on.
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