The Final Conflict

By VARIETY STAFF

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20th Century-Fox. Director Graham Baker; Producer Harvey Bernhard; Screenplay Andrew Birkin; Camera Robert Paynter, Phil Meheux; Editor Alan Strachan; Music Jerry Goldsmith; Art Director Herbert Westbrook
 
Sam Neill
Rossano Brazzi
Don Gordon
Lisa Harrow
Mason Adams
 

The Final Conflict is the last chapter in the Omen trilogy, which is too bad because this is the funniest one yet.

This time Sam Neill plays Damien Thorn, all grown up now after killing off two nice families in the previous chapters. Fear of orphanage, of course, never worries Damien because his real father is the Devil, who only wanted him to go to the best schools, get a job and take over the world for evil.

And now he has, or almost. He's running Thorn Industries and will soon be US Ambassador to England when the fellow who has the job sees a bad dog and goes back to the office and blows his head off, the single startling episode in the whole film.

Having memorized the Book of Hebron from The Apocrypha, plus several dopy soliloquies in Andrew Birkin's script. Neill knows the only obstacle to his plan is the baby born when three stars conjoin overhead.

There's also the matter of the daggers. If you remember the first two episodes, somebody or other, sometimes mom, sometimes dad, sometimes a stranger, was always trying to stab little Damien to death with the daggers.

This is the first feature for director Graham Baker, a veteran of British TV commercials, and it seems like he doesn't quite know what to do when the daggers don't have a brand name to hold toward the camera or the dialog stretches beyond two sentences.

(Color) Widescreen. Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1981. Running time: 108 MIN.