A melodramatic movie review

I lead an exceedingly meaningless and miserable life; so dreadful is it that I am desperately willing to pursue nearly any activity—no matter how inane and boorish it may be—in order to temporarily escape the wretched drudgery of my daily existence. I would like to think that this really isn’t the case, but reason tells me that it must be so, for I can conceive of no other explanation for why I decided to go see the remake of The Omen this past Tuesday night.

To call this movie bad is to do a grave injustice to every truly bad movie that has ever been made. No, this movie was not bad; it was shit, pure and simple. I have watched hundreds of movies in my short life—many of them tremendously horrible pieces of film—but, by any reasonable standard, The Omen has set a new gold standard for ineptitude in filmmaking. It professed to be a thrilling supernatural horror flick, but it was neither thrilling nor horrifying (well, that’s not actually true; I did find myself continuously horrified by the poor acting and wooden writing). Instead, it was scene after disjointed scene of shear boredom and snooze-worthiness.

Let’s get one thing straight: I did not expect this to be a high-quality film. I fully anticipated that it would be a bad movie, but I did expect—foolishly, in hindsight—that it would at least somewhat interesting and mildly frightening. Alas, this was tragically not the case; nothing could have prepared me for the heights of craptitude that The Omen scaled. I’ve felt my heart pound harder while looking at things floating in my toilet, than I did during this movie. Speaking of things seen in a toilet, did I mention that this movie is shit?

Every few minutes I would think, this is the part where things will get interesting! It wasn’t. After a few more minutes I would declare to myself, Aha! Now the movie’s really going to get scary! It didn’t. And finally, as the movie and my hopes for humanity were nearing their end, I whispered in my head, as if in a prayer, I know there’s going to be something really crazy that happens here at the end, something so wildly unexpected that it will make the torturous boredom of the past ninety minutes all worth it! There wasn’t. What a fool I am.

As I left the theater, a few burning questions formed in my mind:

*Why does the son of Satan seem incapable of making any facial expression more startling than a slightly peevish pout?

*Why—Dear God, why?—was Julia Stiles in this movie? She is neither a good actor, nor an attractive looking person. Poor actor + not hot = should not be in blockbuster Hollywood horror show.

*Why does every horror movie made in the past five years use the same old camera tricks? They’re not scary, only boringly predictable.

*Why has President Bush not banished every person involved in the making of this film to the Russian Gulag, where they will spend the rest of their natural lives engaged in back-breaking labor?

As preoccupied as I still am with finding answers to these questions, I find myself haunted by a disturbing fact: I paid hard-earned cash to see this movie and, therefore, I helped to make The Omen happen. This is my fault. Because of me, more films as shitty as this one—my heart quakes at the mere thought of it—will undoubtedly be made. Please pardon me while I go hang my head in shame.