Post by Dracula on Apr 8, 2024 22:38:00 GMT -5
Did two reviews for the price of one, don't feel like creating two threads. Sorry for the mess.
The First Omen(4/6/2024)/Immaculate(4/7/2024)
Most people would be happy to tell you that The Exorcist is an important and influential horror movie and yet on some level the sheer magnitude of its influence still somehow feel under-rated in that it’s a movie from over fifty years ago which still regularly gets blatant ripoffs like The Pope’s Exorcist or Prey for the Devil released almost every single year during some of the slower box office weeks of the year. But this year something seems to have shifted and we’ve instead gotten not one but two horror movies in a row that have realized that there are other devil movies from the New Hollywood era that they can try to monetize. First we’ve got a movie called Immaculate looks to 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby for inspiration but opts for a convent in Italy for its setting and then we’ve got The First Omen which… also looks to 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby for inspiration and also opts to set itself in a convent in Italy… but it’s branded after the 1976 thriller The Omen. Honestly it’s kind of wild how closely these movies that came out within two weeks in the spring of 2024 twin one another and given just how much of an apples-for-apples comparison we’ve got between the two I felt like this was a good opportunity for me to pull out the “double review” format that I haven’t used in a while.
Unlike the other movie I’m looking at today Immaculate is a non-IP property whose debt to a previous movie is less official and it was put out by the cool indie distributor Neon, but it can claim to have the bigger star at its center in Sydney Sweeney, who plays a young woman from Michigan named Cecilia who seeks to become a nun and has been sent to work at a convent in Italy which doubles as a hospice for elderly women of the cloth. While there she sees some odd things going on and gets some strange visions but things really kick into motion once it’s discovered that Cecilia has become pregnant despite having maintained her vow of chastity, which is determined to have been an immaculate conception by the people running the convent. However it become clear quickly that these people do not have her best interests in mind as they become increasingly controlling of her every move. A similar conspiracy seems to be happening in The First Omen, which also looks at a young American woman aspiring to be a nun who also travels to Italy (in this case Rome) to take her vows. This being a direct prequel to the Richard Donner film The Omen it is set in the early 70s and in prequel fashion seeks to explain how Damien came to be born and what forces led to his being handed off to the American diplomat played by Gregory Peck in that movie. This will play out in a similarly conspiratorial convent, this one an orphanage, that may be seeking to find a mother for the devil.
Let’s start by going into The First Omen, which is in this rather odd position of being an extension of a horror franchise that I’m not sure people were really asking for a prequel to despite there being some pretty clear unanswered questions for a prequel to address. The original The Omen is pretty well remembered but is not a movie that should be taken as seriously as The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. It was a movie that was plainly made to exploit the success of those other two movies and it has some cool kill scenes, has some fun with the creepiness of the kid in it, and has an all-timer score by Jerry Goldsmith but otherwise it’s kind of dumb. I kind of get the impression that the people making this prequel aren’t huge fans of the movie either because this doesn’t seem that interested in looking or sounding like the original film and when it does choose to echo the original it does so with hesitation. When I think of The Omen I think of pretty bold widescreen compositions and tons of gothic music and this doesn’t really do that. One could argue that’s a good thing as trying to hard to cater to nostalgia could be kind of cringe as well but I’m kind of mixed on what it tries to replace that style with. The film does try to mirror a couple of that movie’s kills, but a lot of its more memorable images feel more like something out of Jacob’s Ladder than The Omen and it also barters in some kind of out there body horror. In fact the film’s willingness to “go there” when it “goes there” in terms of graphic imagery is probably the best thing it’s got going for it.
Immaculate, by contrast, while still a movie that’s plenty violent is a bit less creative with its bloodletting. However I’d say it makes up for this by nailing the sense of paranoia leading up to the bloodletting better than The First Omen does. Both are essentially movies that posit sects of the Catholic Church being complicit in the conspiracies befalling these expat nuns to be becoming anti-Madonnas, which is something of a subversion of how these devil movies usually go given that the Holy See is usually the cavalry coming in to save the day at the end of these things. Nell Tiger Free and Sydney Sweeney are both pretty good in their respective films at portraying these innocents who become unwitting incubators and find themselves fighting back against the control being exerted on their bodies. Both movies could be seen to be post-Dobbs decision parallels to one degree or anther but I think Immaculate is a bit stronger in this regard because the pregnancy is front and center in that one whereas The First Omen kind of delays that aspect of its story in service of trying to hide what is in fact an extremely obvious plot twist, especially given that this is a prequel and we know exactly what all this is leading up to. Immaculate by contrast has a much more successful twist which actually takes things in a more interesting direction.
Really though, the main reason that Immaculate works better is just that it’s a tighter and more intense than The First Omen, likely in part because it’s about a half hour shorter. I cared more about the Sydney Sweeney, I thought she reacted to the situation she was in more logically, and when the movie really ramps things up in its third act it starts to get legitimately intense leading into a really good finale. That’s not to say it’s a perfect horror movie by any means. It has a kind of a weak villain and probably could have stood to have a stronger supporting cast, and like the film I’m comparing it to it sort of feels obligated to add some kind of cheap jump scares and kills to the proceedings to make sure audiences don’t get bored, but I was overall impressed. As for The First Omen, well I admired some of its audacity and appreciated that it was at least trying to do something with the assignment it was given but at the end of the day it kind of lived down to the reputation of the original The Omen in that it’s kind of a middling movie that’s only occasionally elevated by a couple of cool isolated scenes. So I have a pretty clear favorite between the two in this comparison but man, the fact that two films that are so similar are coming out back to back like this does kind of hurt both of them. I feel like things could have maybe been scheduled a little better all around.
The First Omen: **1/2 out of Five
Immaculate: ***1/2 out of Five
The First Omen: **1/2 out of Five
Immaculate: ***1/2 out of Five
