Movies That Suck/Franchises: The Omen. Omen IV: The Awakening (1991)

Do us all a favor and go back to sleep!

Let me tell you right now just how dedicated I am to this little pastime of mine. Before now, my experience with The Omen ended with The Final Conflict. For me, that was the end of the story and nothing else mattered. Plus, the nature of this movie (a rehash of the first film only with a little girl) never interested me, especially when you put it into context with the series as a whole, and, as the years went on, everything I heard about the movie pegged it as a truly horrendous piece of shit that never should have been made. It came across to me like one of those rare "bastard child" films that certain franchises have, in that they're so abysmal that fans try to act like they never existed to begin with. In fact, when I think back, it reminds me a lot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation in that nearly every official source of information I ever read (books, websites, etc.) talked about the original trilogy and didn't acknowledge this film. The only reason why I even knew there was a fourth Omen film was because I read a listing for it in an October 1999 issue of a TV guide sort of magazine that we got for the satellite we had at the time (because of the little description that came with the listing, I got my first hint that there was more to this franchise than it just being about an evil little kid) and because of the Omen Legacy documentary. What's more, AMC must have had the same viewpoint on the franchise that I would later develop because they only ever showed the original trilogy. So, I was content to never see Omen IV, or the 2006 remake, for that matter, and leave it at The Final Conflict... and then, I began this blog and quickly realized that, in order to avoid a lot of complaining and make it more complete, I would have to seek out and watch various sequels that I never intended to see or even acknowledge, like the aforementioned Next Generation or Beware! The Blob (or Son of the Blob, if you will) or this film. Now, I had intended to simply find a place online to watch both this and the remake but, while I was successful with the latter, I couldn't find a single place that had Omen IV to watch for free and in English! So, guess what I did? I ordered the bitch. I went to Amazon, found the cheapest copy of it that I could (less than six dollars), and ordered it. That, my friends, is how dedicated I am to this. Maybe I care a little too much but I pride myself on being an, at least, decent reviewer, damn it! I got it, I watched it twice for this review, which is how I always do things, and guess what? It sucks. Lordy, lordy, lord, does it suck! The Final Conflict is anticlimactic bore and the remake, which we'll get to next, is just pointless in how it's a virtual Xerox of the original, but this is by far the worst of the series. It's an uninspired, poorly-constructed, badly-acted, stupid TV movie (although it got a theatrical release in other parts of the world) that should have never been made and I thank God did nothing in terms of ratings so we didn't get more tripe like this.

(Like The Final Conflict, this is a film where I had a surprising amount of difficulty finding really good and relevant images. There were some characters I only found mediocre images of, some none at all, and I found no images of the actual deaths whatsoever, only of the build-ups and aftermaths. So, I apologize in advance for this review not being as well as illustrated as I thought it would be. It must be the Omen curse!)

Gene and Karen York, a politically-connected, Virginia couple, adopt a baby girl from an orphanage operated by a sisterhood of nuns and name her Delia. Right from the beginning, strange things begin to happen, like the head nun dying of a heart attack after the adoption, one of the nuns leaving the orphanage shortly afterward, and a priest who attempts to baptize the baby suddenly dying of a heart attack. Some time afterward, after a congressman is severely slandered when his perverse private life is exposed, Gene runs for his position and manages to get it. Seven years later, eight-year old Delia is beginning to develop a very cruel, violent, and manipulative personality towards everyone but her parents and after a couple of altercations with a boy at her school who constantly picks on her, his father is killed in a sudden and horrific freak accident. When she's injured after a horse she tries to ride becomes frightened and bucks her off, it's revealed that she's already menstruating even though she's only eight. The Yorks hire Jo, a practitioner of New Age spirituality, as a nanny for Delia but she immediately senses that there's something strange about her when all of her healing crystals turn black around her. When her friend, Noah, an aura reader, senses a lot of negative energy coming from her, Jo takes Delia to a psychic fair, where her presence alarms the psychics and when an aura photograph of her is taken, the picture reveals dark, sepia tone colors around her. A mysterious fire destroys the fair and kills some of the psychics but, despite warnings from Noah to leave, Jo stays behind in order to try to help Delia deal with her negative energy, only to be shoved through the window by Delia's dog, Ryder. Karen discovers that she's become pregnant and, as her fear towards Delia's menacing behavior deepens, she turns to a local preacher in trying to make sense of what Jo discovered about Delia, which is where she learns of the Antichrist. She eventually hires private detective Earl Knight to track down Delia's biological parents as well as Sister Yvonne, the nun who left the orphanage after Delia's adoption. What Knight uncovers, before he's killed in another freak accident, ties Delia to Damien Thorn, who Karen learns was not only the Antichrist but also Delia's father. Even more horrific, Karen's recently born son, Alexander, whose embryo Delia was carrying inside her body before it was implanted into Karen, is also Damien's seed and destined to become the new Antichrist. Now, Karen must kill her own baby boy in order to prevent the prophecy of the Book of Revelations from coming to pass.

Before we go further into this, let's address the biggest sticking point as to why this movie shouldn't even exist: The Final Conflict ended with the Second Coming of Christ. Jesus came back, Damien died, and the entire world was cleansed of all the evil that he'd caused as the Messiah began his eternal, peaceful reign. So, how could this story possibly be taking place? Why are we suddenly thrown back into a world where everything's going downhill and the red carpet for the Antichrist is basically being rolled out, as the character of Father Mattson puts it? Plus, said character talks about how he feels that the Antichrist will come and cause great suffering in the world and the whole time, I'm sitting there, thinking to myself, "He already did and was defeated!" They do, at least, acknowledge Damien's death but seem to retcon the Second Coming, instead saying that his followers have been waiting for the opportunity to continue his legacy, which they now have with his children. So, when you also take Mattson's warning into account, does it all mean that, in this alternate reality (which is what I feel it is), Damien was merely a precursor and father to the real Antichrist, who is actually baby Alexander? Wow, way to rob the previous films of their impact, especially the original, as if I already didn't have enough reasons to hate this movie. But, of course, the real reason why this film exists, despite what came before, is because the people behind the Fox Television Network saw The Omen as one of many properties that the studio had that they could make part of a series of low budget, movies of the week that they were doing at that time and didn't care what they had to do in order to make it work.

Like Damien: Omen II, Omen IV was ultimately shot by two directors by the time it was completed. The first director, who shot most of the film, was Dominique Othenin-Girard, a French/Swiss filmmaker who's notorious among horror fans for directing Halloween 5, one of the least popular entries in that franchise (and if you've seen my review on it, you'd know that it's not a film I'm very fond of, either), as well as for coming across as completely clueless and full of it in interviews and on that commentary he did for Halloween 5. Like Mike Hodges before him, Othenin-Girard's rather slow filming methods didn't jive well with producer Harvey Bernhard, who said that he was in absolute agony during filming. I'm not sure if Othenin-Girard was fired or if he just quit (IMDB says that he quit but I would really like to think he was fired since I think the guy's a complete idiot) but, whatever the case, about a week before filming wrapped, he was gone and he hasn't done much theatrical work in the years since, spending most of his time doing TV work back in Europe. His last theatrical movie over here was a 1995 movie called Beyond Desire with William Forsythe and he wouldn't direct another real movie until 2008 when he did a Swiss film called Dirty Money - Undercover. His replacement was Jorge Montesi, a Chile-born director of television, as well as actor, who, up to that point, had done stuff like episodes of 21 Jump Street, an episode of the 1980's revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and an episode of the War of the Worlds TV show. Like Don Taylor on the second film, he was brought in because they needed somebody who get the film back on schedule and budget and he was known for working quickly with very low budgets. I sincerely doubt he gave much of a crap about The Omen given the circumstances. His directing career continued throughout the 90's as he directed episodes of Forever Knight, the Highlander television series, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, NYPD Blue, The Outer Limits, and Jake 2.0, as well as numerous TV movies and even a couple of theatrical ones, like 1994's Soft Deceit and Outside the Law with Cynthia Rothrock in 2002. His last credit on IMDB is a 2007 TV movie called Cleaverville.

Since it's a TV movie, it's not surprising that Omen IV, for the most part, doesn't have the best acting but even then, there are some performances and line-reading here that are truly horrendous. Faye Grant gives a passable enough performance as Karen York but still, it could have been a lot better. Karen's character is actually kind of a mixture of both Kathy and Robert Thorn from the original in how she's not only the mother but, like Robert, she also begins to grow suspicious of her child's nature, herself wondering why Delia has never been sick a day in her life, and decides to investigate her past through the help of the private detective. Like Kathy, she starts to fear her own child, especially when she becomes pregnant again since she thinks Delia will try to harm the baby, and like Robert, learns of the Antichrist and begins to suspect that Delia may have some connection to it. A big difference between her and Kathy, though, is that, despite becoming paranoid and obsessed about the possibility of the Antichrist, she never has a mental breakdown and is able to remain rational, seeing how Delia is acts different towards other people than she does with her and her husband, who is completely blind to what's going on. Unfortunately, Grant doesn't have much important stuff to do in her role until the third act where, after receiving the information that Earl Knight uncovered about Damien Thorn before he died, she forces Dr. Hastings to confirm that Damien was the Antichrist, that Delia is his daughter, and that her newborn son, Alexander, was planted inside her as an embryo and is meant to be the new Antichrist. Much like Robert Thorn did, she decides to save the world by killing her own child but the big difference is that, while Robert died trying, Karen ends up killing herself, either due to the influence of Delia and Alexander or because she couldn't bring herself to do it and decided she'd rather be dead. Either way, I will admit that Karen's character arc during the film is kind of sad given how happy she is to have a baby at the beginning, especially since she couldn't become pregnant no matter how much she and Gene tried, and the good times you see her spending with little Delia during the montage of her early childhood, as well as the concern and love she showed for Alexander, but it still doesn't affect me nearly as much as what happened to Robert and Kathy in the original.

Gene calling Jake out... with a dopey look on his face.

While I can give Faye Grant a little bit of leeway in her performance, I can't do the same for Michael Woods as her husband, Gene. His performance is absolutely wooden and lacking in any personality and his character is Robert Thorn if he was an oblivious moron. Like Robert, he starts in a fairly important political position and, after adopting the child, finds himself elected to a much higher one (in this case, it's Congressman), but unlike Robert, Delia's behavior and the bizarre occurrences and deaths happening around her never strike him as particularly odd. He believes everything that Delia says and never considers that she might not be telling the truth, always coming up with some excuse as to why that's not the case. Actually, I began to wonder if he was acting like this because he was a Satanist himself, as Karen momentarily suspects, but it turns out that's not the case and he's just an ignorant pawn in the Satanists' plot to help Alexander rise to power (although, he does suggest out of nowhere that they go to Rome, which is where the Antichrist is prophesized to rise from). The only moment I can think of where Gene showed any conviction is when he confronted his friend and colleague Jake Maddison (Don S. Davis) about his plan to pave over wooded areas for urban infrastructure, saying that having a friend like him on Capital Hill has gone to his head and he's become what they used to hate, and even then, Woods' acting is so bland that it's nothing less than cringe-inducing. Surprisingly, though, Woods still gets TV work to this day, so what do I know?

Since she's eight years old rather than five, Delia (Asia Vieira) has much more to say and is more of a character than Damien in the original film. She may act all sweet and innocent towards her parents but to everyone else, she's a violent and cruel child who is instantly hostile towards anyone she doesn't like and makes anybody who messes with her in any way, shape, or form pay. She beats on this kid who picks on her with her lunchbox and follows that up by making it look like it was all him to most of the adults by allowing him to punch her, leaving a bleeding lip, and tricking him onto a high ladder, causing him to wet his pants in fear. She's also not at all fond of her family new nanny, Jo, becoming especially nasty towards her new-age type of spirituality that involves healing crystals and the like. That leads into something else about Delia: from the beginning, she knows who she is and where she comes from, which explains her aversion to anything that has to do purity and religion. Even as a baby, she looked evil in some shots, and later on when she's an eight-year old, she uses her power to kill those who she feels threaten her in some way, like the father of the boy she beat on, the psychics at the fair, and Jo, whom she unleashes her Rottweiler, Ryder, on. Exactly how much she knows about the conspiracy of Satanists around her, like Dr. Hastings and Lisa Roselli, the nanny who replaces Jo, and whether she's actually jealous of baby Alexander is speculative (although the latter mentions having had a "talk" with Delia) but, regardless, by the end of the film, she knows who her brother is and is acting as his protector, telling Karen to, "See him. Really see him." She's obviously going to continue acting as his protector during his rise to power as well. If nothing else, Delia is at least more than just a gender-switched version of Damien from the original but I still find the mystery surrounding him to be much more interesting than anything that has to do with her.

The one glimmer in this wretched cesspool of a movie is Michael Lerner as Earl Knight, the private detective who Karen hires to find Delia's real parents and is the one who enabled Gene to become Congressman when he exposed his predecessor as a sleazeball. Lerner absolutely rocks in this role, demonstrating an ability to make even the lowest form of scripting and characterization work reasonably well. He has a great charisma to him, coming across as somebody who loves taking down people who deserve it, and is also quite witty in his detecting methods, like when he's trying to get some information out of a bartender and when the guy refuses to say anything since he's an ex-cop rather than a real one, he slips him a $20 bill and asks, "What does twenty bucks get me, Vanna?" The bartender responds, "A vowel. Maybe a consonant," and Earl goes, "Ooh, tough guy." It's a great little moment for him, as is the moment where he shows Karen the names of the people who hired him to take down Gene's predecessor and when she sees Jake Maddison's name among them, he notices her reaction and asks, "Smell a rat?" He also comes across as a compassionate guy too, taking pity on Karen when she becomes distraught over the things that have happened to her family over the years since they adopted Delia and helping her to her car when she has something akin to an early contraction in his office. Above everything else, Earl proves to be a really good and resourceful PI, hiring some clowns to create a distraction at the orphanage while he searches through their records on Delia (which turn out to be bogus in regards to her parents) and manages to get enough information from that bartender to track Sister Yvonne down to North Carolina, where she's established a new identity (I like his line, "Figured I'd go down and share a vision with her,"). Granted, he does do something shitty in showing her a picture of Delia that frightens and distracts her to where she gets bitten by a bunch of rattlesnakes, leading to her death, but he's still a great character and I wish he were the lead of this movie rather than really getting involved in the story at almost an hour in. I would have loved to have known more about him, like why he quit his previous job as a cop and why he's so quick to emphasize that he is an ex-cop, but no, he's just a character who comes in to brighten up the movie a little bit before he gets killed for his meddling.

One character who really can't take the hint that Delia is an evil child until it's too late is Jo Thueson (Ann Hearn), the nanny that the Yorks hire. Despite everything that happens after she meets Delia, like her healing crystals turning black from her presence, the negativity both she and her friend, Noah (Jim Byrnes), sense from her, the ominous aura surrounding her in the picture Noah takes of the two of them (not to mention that it's undulating towards her head!), the deadly fire that breaks out at the psychic fair afterward, and Delia's overall dislike of her and her beliefs, Jo refuses to leave even when Noah warns her to, stupidly saying, "She's just a little girl," and that she wants to help her. Well, she learns too late just how dangerous this "little girl" she's trying to help is when she tries to meditate with her and senses more evil within her before she ends up getting spit on and attacked by Ryder, who kills her when she tries to warn Karen of what she's discovered. Noah is definitely the smarter one of the two in that he knows from the start just how dark and negative Delia is from what he senses, almost becoming sick by merely being in her presence, and when he sees the dark aura surrounding her in the picture of her and Jo, which precedes the sudden fire that destroys the fair, he tries to warn Jo to get away from Delia. According to Earl Knight, after Jo's death, Noah simply disappeared and is never heard from again, making it unclear as to whether he simply put enough space between himself and Delia as he could or if he was killed offscreen for what he discovered.

At first, I thought Sister Yvonne (Megan Leitch) and the other nuns, especially the Mother Superior (Susan Chapple), were Satanists in disguise who goad an unsuspecting couple into adopting a demonic child, like Father Spiletto did to Robert Thorn, but upon my second viewing, I found that the case is actually that they couldn't bring themselves to kill a child, even an evil one like Delia. In any case, Sister Yvonne is not at all happy with what pushed onto the Yorks and while the Mother Superior is at first comforting towards her, she later physically punishes her for her continuing breakdown about it, especially when she says that Delia should have never been born. When the Mother Superior suddenly dies of a heart attack while slapping her, and after she experiences some menacing paranormal activity herself, Yvonne quits the sisterhood and, after a couple of failed attempts to warn the Yorks of the truth (making her this film's equivalent to Father Brennan), she disappears completely. Through Earl's investigation, you learn that she became a prostitute for a time before finding some new type of faith, becoming a strange prophet under the name of Felicity after relocating to North Carolina, where she demonstrates the power of her faith by stepping into a container filled with rattlesnakes and picking them up. Like I said earlier, Earl ends up getting her killed when he shows her a picture of her holding baby Delia with Karen and, in her fear, becomes distracted and gets bitten many times by the snakes. Before she dies, Felicity warns Earl of Delia's nature and at her trailer, he finds information that she's gathered about Gene over the years and, most significantly, information about Damien Thorn.

This is hardly the best image of Hastings but it was the only

one I could find that wasn't of his death scene.

Like the other films, you have members of a Satanic cult who work in different positions, arranging the coming of the new Antichrist, an opportunity they've been waiting for ever since Damien's death. Chief among them is Dr. Hastings (Madison Mason), the York family doctor, who sees to it that Karen becomes the mother of the Antichrist by extracting his embryo from Delia's body when she comes in after her attempt at horseback riding goes awry and implants it inside of Karen when she's brought after she faints when Jo falls to her death right in front of her. Karen makes him spill the beans using the very painful method of stabbing his hand to his desk with a scalpel (a surprisingly bloody effect for an early 90's TV movie) and once he's told her everything, saying that Alexander is going to create a new world, he attempts to keep her silent by taking a gun out of his desk drawer but she stabs him to death before he can shoot. Like I mentioned earlier, Gene's friend Jake Madison is also involved since he was a member of the committee that arranged for one of the Congressmen to be publicly humiliated in a scandal so Gene could take his place and after it happened, he really pushed for him to run for it. It seems like he's doing this simply out of a want for wealth and power, which Gene calls him out on when he discovers his urban infrastructure project. You even have a brief Mrs. Baylock equivalent in the form of Lisa Roselli (Andrea Mann), the nanny who replaces Jo after her death, although she's killed quite easily by Karen before she can pose any threat. Really, the only person who shares what Karen slowly begins to believe is Father Mattson (Duncan Fraser), the priest who she goes to in order to make sense of the connections between certain aspects of Jo's beliefs and the Bible, which is where the Antichrist is brought up. Mattson tells her all about the Antichrist, what he'll do, how he'll deceive people, and makes a comment about how most of humanity is unwittingly in league with Satan due to the current state of the world, saying, "Our hell is his paradise." One line he says that I do like is when Karen asks him if the Antichrist can be stopped and he says, "If there wasn't, I'd pack it in right now." He's also the one who suggests that the Antichrist could possibly be a female, although that turns out to not be the case.

One of the aspects of Omen IV that strikes me is just how bland and generic the film looks. I don't know what it is about Canada but whenever a movie is filmed up there, as this was, 99% of the time it ends up having a very cheap, uninspired look and that's certainly the case here, to the point where it's also the weakest film in the series from a stylistic point. I don't care much for the overdone visuals of the 2006 remake but at least that is memorable in a way; this is just, "bleh," and Lifetime TV-ish (I know that's to be expected, given that it is a TV movie, but that's not something you want in an Omen movie. The only scene in the film that I find kind of visually appealing is the one that takes place in the snow in broad daylight and even that borders a bit on cheap; everything else can only be described as drab and unremarkable, even in a scene in a church where you see a bunch of multicolored candles. As for atmosphere, forget about it. There is none to be found here, especially when you add in the film's highly inappropriate original music score. Let's put it this way: Damien: Omen II had more of an ominous feeling to it than this thing ever does! What's more, the film is sometimes edited in a very clichéd and chaotically abrupt way. For instance, the scene where Earl Knight is shown taking photographs of the original Congressman with a prostitute comes straight out of nowhere and ends just as abruptly, with the film cutting right to another scene when he hits the ground after falling off the ladder he was standing on. It's so fast that the first time I saw it, my brain almost got whiplash! There are other instances like that in the film but that's the one that stood out to me the most. The first major death scene is also filmed with a slow-motion method that makes it look very cheap and cheesy, like what you'd expect from a TV movie made around this time. And while the moments leading up to Earl's death are done in an interesting manner, the death itself and the telegraphing of it that occurs throughout the scene are cringe-inducing and give the impression that both the filmmakers and the editor didn't know what they were doing or how to build suspense. But for me, the biggest failure of the editing is the fact that often, I realize that a lot of time has meant to have passed between cuts but I had clue that was the case until I heard someone mention it. For instance, Karen is first informed that she's pregnant, then in the next couple of scenes, she's four months along and then, in like the next cut, she's six months along. It's so clumsily done that, by the time she goes into labor, I didn't realize that much time had passed since she first hired Earl to find Delia's real parents, or that Gene was now trying to get re-elected. It also doesn't help that a lot of the movie takes place in early-to-mid winter, making it even harder to realize how long you're in one year of the movie's timeline. In fact, this poorly-executed passage of time reminds me a lot of The Crater Lake Monster, that horrible 1977 flick where, a good ways into the film, you're suddenly told that it's been six months since the story began, although there had been nothing in the editing (dissolves, fades to black, etc.) that would have let you know that was the case. Thank God this movie at least had a little bit of montage showing Delia's early childhood or I would have really been thrown when she went from a baby to a toddler in a cut! (And before anyone says anything, I'm aware that there is a cut like that in the original Omen but otherwise, that film was edited far better and more sensibly than this.)

This is the first Omen movie to deal with other types of spirituality besides Christianity, one of which is part of Native American culture: the idea of healing crystals, which Jo Thueson brings into the York household and unintentionally repels Delia with, later seeing that all of her crystals have turned black from either being touched by or simply being in the girl's presence. There's also the notion of auras, which Jo's friend, Noah, is able to both sense and take photographs of, which result in more evidence that there is a lot of negativity surrounding Delia, and there are even psychics, who all become uneasy and full of dread when Delia is nearby and are themselves quite frightened when they see her disturbing aura photograph. Jo, being a New Age practitioner, tries to use meditation to get to the bottom of Delia's condition and ends up learning just how evil she is before she's killed, although she did manage to point Karen towards the book she practices from, which eventually leads her to the Bible and the prophecies of the Antichrist. This stuff is kind of interesting but, even though there is a connection between it and Christianity that's eventually revealed, it takes up such a small section of the film that it ultimately proves to have been meaningless to introduce it in the first place. What's more, I'm not entirely sure why Delia is so repelled by the healing crystals and why she angrily denounces Jo's beliefs when they're not the same as Christianity, which is what she should fear. Maybe she knows that there's some kind of connection but it still comes across as rather random. And I don't know what's up with the stuff that Sister Yvonne takes part in when she becomes Felicity in North Carolina. It's clearly some strange iteration of Christianity, as she tries to prove the power of her faith with those rattlesnakes, which I'm assuming are meant to represent the devil, but whether or not it stems from anything in reality is not something I'm aware of, although I wouldn't be surprised if there were something like this out there.

Given that this is an early 90's TV movie, you shouldn't go into it expecting some really gruesome and bloody death scenes like those in the previous films. In fact, the first two deaths in the movie, the Mother Superior and the priest who attempts to baptize Delia, are nothing more than sudden heart attacks, with the latter happening after the priest senses a menacing presence in the church, as shown when the candles in the room are blown out by a gust of air after he drops dead in front of an altar of Christ. The first really major death is of the father of the boy who picked on Delia and ended up getting beaten up by her as a result. Following the scene where she tricks the boy into climbing a ladder after her, causing him to wet himself in fear, his father has an angry confrontation with Karen York outside of the school and makes it known that this isn't going to be the last she hears from him. As he leaves, he stomps over to Karen's van in an attempt to do something but backs off when he sees Delia sitting inside. She watches as he walks back to his car, gets inside, and swerves around to drive out of the parking lot, but he's not watching what he's doing and is unable to stop in time to avoid a truck that's backing up perpendicular to his car, with its sharp, tailgate open. The tailgate slashes right through the windshield, at the guy's head, and while you don't see it, you get the impression that it decapitated him. The next major scene after that is when Jo makes the mistake of taking Delia to the psychic fair to have her aura photographed. She's already causing havoc when she arrives at the fair as the psychics become alarmed by her presence but things really get bad when she becomes enraged after the photograph is taken. A gust of wind blows through the fairground, knocking over an oil lamp that catches fire to the tapestry hanging from its table and igniting the right sleeve on its would-be seller's sweater. As Jo tries to catch up with Delia, she accidentally knocks another lady into a table, causing her to push over a lit candelabra there and ignite a fire near a blind psychic who's pulled out of the way by another person. One guy watching someone who's juggling some burning objects isn't as lucky, however, as the juggler suddenly drops them at his feet and he's set ablaze, stumbling into another booth. An explosion rips through a tent, causing a massive fire that spreads throughout the fairground and causes everyone to panic as they try to escape, all while Delia looks back, smiling evilly as the fair burns to the ground while she walks away with Jo.

Speaking of Jo, she gets hers next when she tries to meditate with Delia in order to find the source of her negative energy, only for Delia to lose her patience and give her a cryptic message about her real father before spitting in her face. Shocked by what she just did, Jo stumbles out of Delia's room and into the hallway, where she comes face to face with Delia's Rottweiler, Ryder (who became her pet when he appeared out of nowhere and saved her from getting hit by a truck when she was a few years younger) and is hit in the face by some wind. When she turns around and sees that Delia is following her, she runs upstairs into her own room, closing and locking the door behind her, with Delia following her movements on the floor below. Jo tries to get Karen's attention in the yard below but, just when she happens to look up and see her, Ryder smashes through the door and leaps at Jo, sending her flying through the window and causing her to land on top of Delia's little merry-go-round, right in front of Karen, who lets out a scream before fainting out of fear and shock. Another death doesn't happen until the middle of the third act, which, except for the scenes involving Earl Knight, makes the movie all the more boring to sit through (not that the deaths elevated it that much, though). When Earl tracks down Sister Yvonne in North Carolina where she has a new life as Felicity, he sneaks into the church during the demonstration of her faith with the rattlesnakes and gets in line with a bunch of other people who are asking her to pray for them. Everything's going fine, as she reassures everyone that the snakes' venom can't hurt them, but when Earl hands her a picture of herself standing next to Karen holding baby Delia, it goes south immediately. She becomes afraid and throws away the picture, distracting her long enough for the rattlesnake that she's holding to bite her on the cheek, prompting her to throw it to her right. The other snakes in the container she's standing in then attack, with one biting at her leg and when Earl tries to help her, he gets bitten on the hand. Felicity gets bitten several more times on the leg and collapses on the stage, yelling in pain. In the next cut, she's taken to the hospital, gasping for air as the venom begins to take its toll on her. Earl receives some anti-venom for his snakebite and is told that he's going to be fine, whereas Felicity is probably not going to make it. Before Earl leaves the hospital, he goes in to see Felicity, who is now serious condition, hemorrhaging internally and around her mouth (the makeup effects are on her do make you go, "Ugh,"). She's only able to weakly whisper something about "the Beast" to Earl before he leaves, after which a window opens by itself and projects a shadow that resembles an inverted cross on the wall above her bed. She then coughs a little bit and tries to yell something before finally expiring.

Earl's own death comes next. Stuck in North Carolina and unable to get back to Virginia because of the weather, he mails his findings to the Yorks and then just mills around the town for a little bit, smiling at a nearby choir singing Christmas hymns and looking through a toy store's window, where he sees an automated, toy construction crane (foreshadowing of what's to come). He walks down to another shop and looks through its window a little manger display, only for the figures, including the baby Jesus, to turn discolored and demonic as he looks at them. Freaked out by this, he backs into a woman behind him and then stumbles down the sidewalk as it begins to rain, only to run into a demonic version of the choir, who happen to singing the Ave Satani song (the version originally heard in the sequence leading up to Father Brennan's death in the first film). Horrified by this, and clutching his chest, Earl falls to the ground before getting back to his feet and running off, as we're shown what's about to happen as a nearby construction crane begins operating by itself, hoisting a wrecking ball up into the air. After running for a little while longer, Earl eventually crosses a street and stops in front of the construction office, appearing relieved as he thinks he's escaped from the danger he felt he was in. It doesn't last long, though, as the wrecking ball smashes straight through the office and heads right towards him, with him only able to watch in shock before it slams into him and impales him with the hook on its bottom. The shot of the ball going through the construction office and the effect of it reflected in his eye before it hits him look pretty good but the actual effect of him getting rammed by it is clearly a dummy.

I don't know if I'd say the climax here is worse than The Final Conflict or not because that was an anticlimactic letdown when it should have been glorious, whereas there are no such expectations with this, but, regardless, it begins when Karen confronts Dr. Hastings. After stabbing his hand to the desk with a scalpel, she forces him to tell her all about Damien Thorn, Delia, and how Alexander is meant to be the Antichrist who'll usher in a new world. He pulls a pistol out of his drawer and swings around to try to shoot her but she stabs him in the chest with the scalpel before he can. Taking his gun with her, Karen heads back home, where she's confronted by Delia's new nanny, Lisa Roselli, and kills her very easily when Roselli, even though Karen's pointing the gun right at her, charges at her and tries to struggle with her. After shooting her and sending her tumbling down the stairs, Karen goes into Alexander's room to find Delia there, holding her baby brother. Karen says she wants to see her son and Delia tells her, "See him. Really see him." That's when Karen sees the "666" on Alexander's right palm (not only is it a crappy-looking effect but that's going to be a lot harder to hide than Damien's birthmark under his hair) and attempts to shoot both him and Delia but, either through the children's power or because she can't bring herself to do it, she turns the gun on herself and commits suicide offscreen. The movie ends with Karen's funeral, with the last shot being Gene walking with Delia and Alexander, down a path in the cemetery that looks like an inverted cross (subtle).

The film shamelessly borrows some of the themes that Jerry Goldsmith composed for both The Omen and The Final Conflict and when you hear the original music, composed by Jonathan Sheffer, you understand why because it seems like either that guy knew this was a bad film and didn't even try or is a talentless hack. The latter actually could be true because he mainly works as a conductor and hasn't worked on many projects as an actual composer. Most of the stuff he has composed music for consists of more television work, short films, and documentaries, with his theatrical films being little known flicks like On Valentine's Day, In a Shallow Grave (with Michael Biehn), Bloodhounds of Broadway (which has an acting role by Madonna), Pure Luck (with Martin Short and Danny Glover), and, the title that really caught my attention, a 1988 movie called Zits. Judging from the plot synopsis, it's not really a movie about pimples but I'm just like, "They got a guy who scored a movie called Zits to do an Omen movie?" It's not fair to judge a person's work based on the name of the movie they did music for, I know, but I wouldn't be giving him so much crap if his score for Omen IV didn't suck so bad. So, what's so bad about it, you might ask? It's goofy as hell and sounds like something you'd expect to hear in a Looney Tunes cartoon, that's what! His music involving the family moments between the Yorks and baby Delia is okay but it's like he doesn't know how to score scenes that are supposed to be ominous, suspenseful, or scary. You hear music during the opening titles that sounds far too whimsical for a movie about the devil's child, the scene where Delia tricks that kid into climbing that ladder is scored like an old Disney cartoon, and during the scene at the fair, you hear music that sounds like what Danny Elfman would do if he were on speed and had all of his talent sucked out. Even worse, when you mix in Goldsmith's masterful and genuinely menacing music, it sounds as if there are two completely different movies here battling for dominance and the sucky one is winning. For instance, the ending scene at the funeral has Goldsmith's original Ave Satani, which leads into the ending credits, and it does paint a grim picture of an uncertain future as Delia and the newborn Antichrist head off with their unsuspecting father... and then it's completely ruined once the theme ends because it goes back into Sheffer's silly music. Fortunately, they end with his family theme, which works a little better as it reminds you of the happiness Karen had with her adopted daughter and how it's all been shattered in the most tragic way possible, but the damage is already done by that point. It's truly amazing what a train-wreck this score is and it's one of the major things that kills the movie for me since, personally, music can often make or break it.

There are no two ways about it: Omen IV: The Awakening sucks and sucks hard. Other than Michael Lerner's likable performance, a little bit to do with Faye Grant, and some occasional okay effects, there is nothing to recommend the movie: it's a poorly-made, uninspired, boring, pointless movie with bad acting, uninteresting characters, zero suspense and atmosphere, death scenes that are hindered by their being in a TV movie, a bland, generic look, confusing editing that makes it hard to remember where you are in the story's timeline, and an atrociously inappropriate music score that, when combined with Jerry Goldsmith's original themes, makes you want to be watching the other movies instead all the more. I really wish that I hadn't wasted my time with this piece of junk because it was pretty miserable to do this review but, for completion's sake, I did it and I hope everyone enjoys it. And if I got some things about the story wrong, I apologize but this is one instance where I'm not that broken up about it if that's the case, because I'm never watching this damn movie ever again!