They're Remaking The Omen

Trolling through IMDB today I found that the geniuses at 20th Century Fox are doing another version of The Omen. Some of y'all might remember the 1976 version with Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, the incomparable Billie Whitelaw, and the usually-dead-by-the-end-of-the-film David Warner. It's a pretty good high concept premise. Logline: a wealthy ambassador discovers, after several people around him die in bizarre accidents, that his adopted son may be the antichrist. I'd commission a treatment if I were a producer. The story turns out to have more holes in it than Bush's National Guard record, but with Peck adding his credibility and director Richard Donner keeping the thing moving briskly, those holes are hard to spot with just one viewing.

Therein lies the problem with remaking this thing.

Not only have most horror fans already seen this movie, but they've seen the two sequels, which were not only bad movies by themselves, but they helped expose the plot problems that Richard Donner had so brilliantly glossed over. Problems like these:

1) It's apparent in Damien: Omen II that Damien's canine origins can be detected with a simple blood test. How was it that such blood tests were never done during the first five years of this kid's life? One of my earliest memories is of some enormous nurse driving a huge spike into my finger and blood gushing forth. Pediatricians are all over you during the first few years of your life. Unless the Thorns were Chrisitan Scientists, Damien would have had many blood tests as a toddler, making concealment of his ancestry impossible.

2) The rules of prophecy seem to be pretty loose in the picture. According to The Bible, the mark of the beast is supposed to appear on the hand or forehead of those who follow the devil. Why does Damien get to keep his beneath his hair, and why, for that matter, does the dead priest have it on his inner thigh? And my impression of the Book of Revelations (which has its own story problems) was that the antichrist only placed the mark on people after his rise to power. How then can people have the mark of the devil as a birthmark before Damien is even born? Are people predestined to be followers of the antichrist? If so, wouldn't the all-knowing God who set this whole thing up get the body parts right?

3) Why would the devil wait until people have spilled the beans about Damien before he kills them? The movie suggests the devil made some attempts at preemptive cover-up--burning the hospital and the maternity wards to destroy all the birth records. (Ancillary plot hole. Wouldn't Robert Thorn, the ambassador to Rome at the time, have heard about the terrible fire that burned down the hospital where his son was born? Why would he need a cab driver to explain it to him five years later?) Why does the devil not simply kill those involved in the birth of the antichrist as soon as is convenient? Surely the devil would have met enough mob guys to learn the old saying "Three can keep a secret if two are dead." Why, indeed, would the devil wait to kill Robert Thorn until Thorn's got his little boy on a church altar with a holy dagger ready? Thorn flew back to England from Rome. Can't the devil, who has engineered all kinds of accidental deaths by now, arrange a simple and easily explained plane crash? Of course, this may be the predestined way that this has to work out, (the photographs foreshadowing the deaths imply it), but the movie never really thinks that possibility through. If the devil has to play by certain rules, wouldn't it be handy if someone in the movie could let us in on what they are?

4) Why does the priest who first hips Robert Thorn to the whole antichrist thing choose an approach that will make him impossible to believe? I know it's hard to approach someone with a message like that without sounding crazy, but most people would at least try.

There are other story problems, but you get my point. Any remake of the movie would probably retain these flaws (unless they're planning to radically restructure the story), while lacking the element of surprise that made the original a hit. The Omen didn't allow us the time to recognize its flaws when we first saw it, but horror fans have had almost thirty years to mull them over. The only way the movie works now is as a means to admire the professionalism of Peck, Remick, Whitelaw, Donner, and composer Jerry Goldsmith, who manage to make the absurd seem frighteningly credible. And because that movie is now on DVD with loads of commentary and extras, what earthly (or unearthly) reason anyone would have for shelling out ten bucks to watch a remake is beyond me.