Omen IV: The Awakening – Classic Horror Movie Review

Director: Jorge Montesi, Dominique Othenin-Girard

Production Company: FNM Films, Harvey Bernhard Productions, Mace Neufeld Productions

Country: USA

Year: 1990

It was too much to hope for a decent fourth film in a horror franchise, wasn’t it? Too much to hope for that somehow they would manage a reboot nine years after the previous installment with some degree of competency. Why do we delude ourselves with such ideas? When you kill off Damien, the antichrist, in the previous film, how do we reinvent things? Simple. We get his daughter and recycle the entire thing over again. A bit like Halloween, only worse because it’s not Danielle Harris.

When we do it here, we don’t do it with any of the flair or thought that the first film might have had. Omen IV: The Awakening is as dull and boring and cheesy as you can get. It’s as much a remake as a reboot of the first, with a few bits right near the end to tie everything in together and make it a sequel. One or two interesting scenes, with the most interesting character (that being Michael Lerner’s private detective, Earl Knight), don’t make any of this fun to watch, even if there is an entertaining rattlesnake attack at a church.

Delia gives the evil eye.

Throwing in a kind of Rosemary’s Baby revelation at the end doesn’t redeem having to sit through the previous 80 minutes with, unfortunately, a disastrous performance by Asia Vieira as Delia York, the new antichrist, almost primarily because she’s given corny dialogue, and lots of it, and told as a child actress to try and pull it off. Maybe, therefore, much of the blame should be apportioned to the script put together by Brian Taggert, from a story by Taggert and Harvey Bernhard. So we will. Guys, the script was bloody awful.

The clever choice by the original film was to have Damien with as little dialogue as possible. Even the remake would go down this route a decade and a half later. It gives the inexperienced thespian less to do, and you can do more with a look than with a thousand words that sound cliched and hackneyed and not at all creepy. Hence Sadako in Ring was a thousand times creepier than Samara from The Ring. So yes. Not great. Here, it all falls down.

And so it goes for everything in the film. The direction is laughable at best and downright atrocious at other points. Things that are meant to be scary are unintentionally hilarious, and any kind of suspense is erased within seconds of turning on the film. It’s not so much an offense to the first film, not so much an affront to cinema, as simply a straight up depressing experience of watching an attempt to put something together with no thought of trying to go for anything near skill.

I tried and find some redeeming qualities, but the only things I could come up with are fairly small. The silent resolution to the mother’s harrowing ordeal is the most artful thing done, the return of a variation of the main theme for the final shot is a welcome moment, and the credits finally appear. Trust me when I say the credits rolling are a highlight of the film.

Rating: 2/10

Review by Kieran Judge

Thanks for checking out this review. Have you seen the film? Did you like it any more than I did? Drop the review a like, leave a comment down below, and follow the blog to keep up to date with my reviews, opinions, news, and other bits and pieces.