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USA/Canada: George A. Romero, 2005

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USA: John Musker/Ron Clements, 1989

(Watched with commentary by John Musker, Ron Clements, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman)

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USA: John Moore, 2006

A review copy of the 2006 remake of The Omen (R2 UK) arrived this morning. I can't exactly claim that I had high hopes for this latest Hollywood cash-in (a movie made entirely because of the marketing possibilities of a 6/6/06 release date, it would seem), but jeez Louise! Even I wasn't expecting it to be as bad as it turned out. I mean, it uses almost exactly the same script as the original (a writer called Dan McDermott was brought in to "update" it, but the changes he made were so minor that the Writers' Guild of America didn't even give him credit), and the original is one of my favourite films of all time. I figured that it would at least be competent, if unremarkable. Sadly, I was wrong. The new Omen is not merely bad, it's a shit film.

I'll have a full review up before too long (probably October 16th, when reviews of the new UK releases of the first four Omen films will also be going up at DVD Times), so I'll be brief. Crap acting, crap music, crap "scares", crap direction (seriously, this is the one horror remake I've seen that actually looks less slick than the original), and Jesus Christ, the kid playing Damien is the worst of the lot. Scowling at the camera and wearing pasty make-up does not a scary child make, people. A couple of intriguing dream sequences nonewithstanding, this film is a worthless waste of celluloid. I didn't think it was possible to take a classic film and screw it up this badly, but sadly I was mistaken.

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UK: Piers Haggard, 1971

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USA: John Musker/Ron Clements, 1989

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UK: Stephen Fry, 2003

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USA/Germany: Brett Ratner, 2002

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Original title: Lucía y el Sexo
Spain: Julio Medem, 2001

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UK: Norman J. Warren, 1976

After a less than auspicious start, consisting of the generic murder of a generic victim, Satan's Slave pleasantly surprised me. It's not masterpiece, to be sure, but it's a competently-made supernatural horror film with an impressively spooky atmosphere. The plot deals with a young woman, Catherine (Candace Glendenning), who, on the cusp of turning 20, witnesses the fiery death by exploding car (!) of her parents, on the very doorstep of the house of her uncle Alexander (Michael Gough). Kindly Uncle Al takes the bizarelly untraumatised Catherine into the fold, but it soon turns out that he, his wacky son Stephen (Martin Potter) and his secretary Frances (Barbara Kellerman) have a sinister ulterior motive in adopting her as their own.

It's all a bit uneven: the script makes a major bungle by revealing the malicious nature of Alexander and Stephen within the opening ten minutes, and a lot of the dialogue is of a risible standard. The performances are also rather hit and miss, although Candace Glendenning, who seems to have all but disappeared after making this film, makes an appealing and at times resourceful heroine, with her wide eyes and raven hair, while the inimitable Michael Gough makes the most of his distinctive and powerful voice in the role of her malevolent uncle.

The film also benefits from some truly impressive cinematography (a grand total of five cameramen are credited, of whom Les Young seems to have been the chief), which makes the English countryside seem like a genuinely haunted place, while John Scott's score is pleasantly ominous, if a tad hokey. Unfortunately, some of the gore effects are more than a little cringe-worthy: it's clear that Warren doesn't know when to hold back, leering over the effects in extreme close-up and revealing just how fake-looking they truly are. This is especially true of the rubbery-looking flesh used for brandings and slicings, while an otherwise well-directed suicide features a lumps of pink-looking putty, presumably signifying the victim's innards, bulging out of various orifices.

Still, I enjoyed Satan's Slave. I've always had a thing for supernatural horror, especially of the demonic possession variety, and this one is well-executed. It's rather predictable, and the budgetary constraints are at times all too visible, but it's a good, solid effort with a palpable sense of dread - which, in a horror film, is almost always the most important feature.

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Spain/West Germany: Jess Franco, 1970

Back in 2003, I happened to see a film by a Spanish director by the name of Jesus "Jess" Franco. The film in question was Justine, and I'm sorry to say I thought it was so bad that I didn't make it beyond the opening half-hour. This was when my Euro-cult craze was still in its infancy (the only such films I'd seen were around a third of Dario Argento's catalogue), and I realise that Franco has a rather formidable following among such circles. Therefore, recently, when I was doing a little borrowing and trading with other Euro-cult fanatics, I decided to give Franco another go, with his 1970 film Eugenie.

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that Eugenie and Justine are pretty similar films. In addition to sharing a director, a writer/producer (Harry Alan Towers) and a composer (Bruno Nicolai, he of so many gialli), they are both based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade and have a similar narrative theme of an innocent young woman embarking on a series of sexual adventures, many of them sadomasochistic. As such, Eugenie is somewhere between a character drama and an exploitation/porn hybrid, although the fact that it takes itself seriously and places no small amount of emphasis on the narrative means that, as one reviewer put it, it's as far from a Skinemax flick as you can possibly get.

Be of no doubt, though, that this is far from a classic. Not much of note really happens, and the whole thing seems to come to an abrupt end long before it should. Franco's attempts to blend fantasy with reality are also not particularly successful, and, to be honest, there's only so much canoodling and breast-fondling I can take before I start looking for something more substantial. And yet, Eugenie's technical qualities set it apart from most films of this sort. Franco had a decent (at least by his standards) budget with this film, and you can tell that every penny ended up on the screen. Shot in anamorphic Technovision, it consistently looks sumptuous, making excellent use of the picturesque island location and, in the more hallucinatory sequences, various dye filters. And the final moments, which show the naked, degraded Eugenie stumbling through sand dunes and along deserted country roads, are haunting in their sheer beauty. Unfortunately, a number of scenes are sullied by being so out of focus that I'm amazed Franco never re-shot them.

The film also has an interesting cast, headed by Marie Liljedahl as the young Eugenie who, while not exactly a first-class thespian, is game for anything and handles the character's innocence well. Her transition from innocent wallflower to sullied damsel never really convinced me, though, as she does little to show any sort of change in her character. The sultry Maria Rohm is also on fine form, and the sheer shock of seeing Christopher Lee in such a dirty picture is well worth the price of admission. (Apparently, he had no idea what sort of film he was appearing in until he saw the final cut, but, looking at the scenes in which he appears, I'm not entirely convinced by this claim.)

In the final analysis, therefore, Franco is a better filmmaker than I previously assumed him to be. The subject matter isn't really to my liking, but here he clearly demonstrates a decent ability behind the camera if given an appropriate budget. For all its faults, I'm not sorry to have watched it, and I'll be less hasty to avoid this director's output in the future.

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