Omen IV: The Awakening
Once again, I probably should’ve known ahead of time that this was really just a TV movie and my expectations might have been a little lower – not that they could’ve been much lower. In any case, I always looked forward to finally seeing this because, well, let’s not beat around the bush, if there’s a movie about an evil little girl, I’m so very there, lol. I figured that as bad as it could get, there’d always be that; sometimes I’m just too optimistic. I have to admit, the pleasant surprise of how good I thought Halloween 4 and 5 were probably has a lot to do with this.
Asia Vieira is not a great deal of fun to watch as the troubled little demoness Delia (seriously, there must be a girl’s name beginning with D scarier than this, lol – or how about just breaking with alliteration for the sake of aesthetics?) The moment she first appeared on screen, all I felt from her was awkwardness – the scenes of her terrorizing her peers at school are closer to Problem Child than Child’s Play. When she speaks for a moment I considered maybe hers would be the kind of “bad” performance a little like Susan Satta’s in Giacomo Cimini’s Red Riding Hood – but no, ultimately, if your primary reason for wanting to watch this movie is her, consider reconsidering. Even the performance aside, the very character just doesn’t have the overarching power over the movie that Damien had.
Though the movie does have a handful of moments which, by the way, have me kind of wanting to recommend double billing it with the aforementioned Red Riding Hood, it’s almost impossible for me to count the number of things that, in the end, are very, very wrong with it – starting with the girl, continuing with the replacement of so much of the religious stuff with new age hippies and snake charmers, it just never ends how often this movie comes out with completely unnecessary fluff.
The quick bad review of this movie would be all too simple – it’s the same old ground as the original, and as such has about as much of a point to it as you’d expect. I guess my problem, then, is that I find myself thinking, ‘if only that were so!’ If only they’d just trod the same ground as the original with a girl instead of a boy (and preferably a more talented one than Vieira) – but somebody involved clearly found themselves at a loose end and decided to try and make it “better” than that. Anyway, like I said, bad as it gets, it nevertheless has a handful of moments, and I’ll probably waste my time on it more than a few more times in the future – but ultimately, you’d be far better off getting one of the Jamie Lloyd Halloween movies, Red Riding Hood, The Bad Seed ... you get the gist …