ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

*This Review Contains Spoilers

What it is: 

A competently written and directed, well-acted, but overly long derivative prequel to the original Omen trilogy. An American girl, raised in a Catholic orphanage, travels to Rome to become a full nun. She works in an all-girls orphanage/home for unwed mothers. There, she uncovers the conspiracy to birth Damian from the original 1976 film. Along the way, she discovers that she is one of many chosen mothers. 

The film slides quite nicely into the events of the original film while setting up a parallel storyline we never knew existed. One in which Damian’s twin sister has been hidden away on Alderaan to keep her safe from the Empire. Um, I mean the evil Catholics trying to assassinate her. 

Director Arkasha Stevenson certainly did her homework, which I appreciated. The little musical cues evoking Morricone’s giallo work made me smile. But at times the film feels like an academic essay littered with extended passages from other, better source material. 

It’s a movie meal that plucked all its ingredients from a list of high-quality horror and sci-fi films including The Omen, Deep Red, The Devils, Rosemary’s Baby, Possession, Flavia the Heretic, Return of the Jedi, To the Devil A Daughter, Inseminoid, Suspiria, and yes…even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

With a meal like this, you know exactly what you’re getting. The consequences of eating a meal like this are twofold: 

1. You’re not hungry anymore. The food fills you up. Job done. 
2. You drive home thinking about that really great meal you had at that awesome restaurant on your birthday 10 years earlier. 

The key ingredient missing is the “extraordinary events happening in an ordinary world” approach taken in the original film. There was almost no supernatural hoo-ha in the original Omen. To an outsider in that world, everything that happens could be viewed as simple coincidence or tragedy. This film is loaded with overt supernatural stuff going down and for the most part, it works. 

What it isn’t: 

• A nunsploitation film. There are no gratuitous repressed nun sexy shenanigans. The first act teases that it might go there, but it never does.  
• Alucarda

What I liked: 

• The performances are top-notch. Kudos to Nell Tiger Free for carrying the picture admirably. 
• The camera work and music are excellent. 
• The concept of organized religion deliberately doing evil things to pump up their membership numbers was accurate. This was the most disturbing idea in the film.
• The birthing scenes.
• The files containing the photos of the failed, deformed antichrist babies. 
• ‘60s-style music needle drops

What I disliked: 

• Too many jump scares in the first half. 
• Too much time spent settling Margaret into her new job at the orphanage. 
• An all-too predictable plot twist for Margaret. 
• Entire sequences lifted from other films. 
• An all-too predictable set-up for a trilogy that will likely end with a teenage Satanic Leia blowing up a bunch of stuff with her newly discovered powers. 

Who is this movie for? 

• Younger horror fans who dug The Nun and other recent jump-scare heavy films will like this a lot more than older viewers who have likely seen all its influences more than once on multiple formats with and without commentary. 
• Disney, who appear hell-bent on resurrecting every good 20th Century Fox franchise from the 1970s.  
• Younger film critics who don’t know that women have dominated the horror genre for 50+ years. 

Summary: 

It’s a worthy effort considering that most franchise reboots aren’t stellar. It wouldn’t be very fair if I said I love a movie like Paul Naschy’s Exorcismo, which is a blatant rip-off of The Exorcist and then slate this film for doing something similar with a bigger budget. It’s a good film when viewed from that perspective. I liked it better than Omen III: The Final Conflict, but not as much as the 1976 original or Damian: Omen II.  It’s a well-made, entertaining film with nothing new to say. A meal that fills you up on a Friday night with your fellow horror fiends.