Assigned!

Time Pieces

Assigned!
The Unofficial and Unauthorised
Guide to Sapphire And Steel
by Richard Callaghan
Telos Publishing ISBN: 978-1-84583-869-0

I always feel a bit torn when I read an account of something which is labelled up as either unofficial or unauthorised or, as in this case, both. There’s usually a lack of occlusion implied by one or more of the creative forces behind a project and also there’s usually not an abundance of illustrative material to be found in these kinds of volumes... such is the case here, with the only picture content being that on the front cover. However, this is sometimes offset by the fact that uncomfortable or awkward issues about a production could be discussed which, more often than not, wouldn’t see the light of day in an authorised edition. And while there’s not a huge amount of controversy on show here, you do get the feeling that, in the few instances of people being consulted for the book, they are being completely truthful about the show which is the focus of this volume and so, yeah, this book is a fun and sometimes informative read.

Assigned! The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Sapphire And Steel is obviously a labour of love for Richard Callaghan who, like many of us of a certain age, remembers being fairly unsettled by this ‘family’ show as a kid. Sapphire And Steel was, if you don’t remember this remarkable series, probably the most terrifying programme on TV... perhaps more so because it was intended for family viewing and was broadcast at times which reflected that, rather than at times reserved for other shows of a scary nature, such as The Omega Factor or Hammer House Of Horror (reviewed here). It ran for three, very sporadic series (and got really screwed up and had to be partially repeated due to a big television strike during the run of one of the 'two story long' seasons). There were six serialised TV ‘assignments’ all told, two per series of varying episode counts and shown as two half hour episodes (with ads) of each assignment per week, sometime between 7 and 8pm on, I think, Tuesday and Thursday nights. And of course, each episode except the last one of each story would end on a cliffhanger (as did the last episode of the last assignment, in a way). I remember it was always the one show that the kids in the playground would talk about the next day.

Why? Because it could be truly terrifying and it was utterly inscrutable in terms of just what the show was really about and who, how and what the two lead characters, Sapphire And Steel, actually were. I mean, you got kind of an idea that they were some kind of ‘elements’, Sapphire played by ex-Avengers girl Joanna Lumley and Steel played by ex-Man From U.N.C.L.E agent, David McCallum... but the writing played with the mysteries of the characters without revealing too much and the enigmatic way in which the two lead stars played these roles ensured that... although we knew the enemy of the week was always ‘time’ in some kind of evil manifestation, breaking through into our world in a supernatural manner to try and do as much damage as possible... we really often didn’t have a flying fig of an idea just what the heck was going on from one episode to the next, other than the ending of each episode was more or less life threatening to at least one character.

The two ‘agents’ spoke to each other using telekinesis most of the time and usually only used their ‘outside voices’ when they wanted one of the human characters to hear what they were saying. They were mostly here to save the humans but, as the second story set on a disused railway station invaded by the spirits of those who died alone in world wars made brutally clear, they were not above sacrificing the odd person to stop time from breaking through and destroying everything. They also had other incredible powers... such as being able to inhabit pictures or, in Sapphire’s case, being able to take time back for a period for their own ends but, the scope, range and details of their particular talents, and the abilities of other elements who would sometimes enter a story to give them a hand, such as Lead or Silver, were often quite flexible and played close to the chest of the writers.

It always felt like there was an overall plan to the thing though so it comes as something of a surprise when revealed in this tome that creator P. J. Hammond, who wrote all but the fifth of the six serials, was kinda making it up as he went along and would like to be surprised as to what the characters would be getting up to next, without doing any planning out. Indeed, from the sound of it, episodes would start being filmed while later episodes were still being written and would often be rewritten on the set, often with he assistance of McCallum who was, like his co-star, very committed to the project.

The book is set up with an introduction followed by a big chapter dedicated to each assignment. Each chapter is split into smaller sections starting off with a very brief plot summary of the story before going into details about various cast members and production crew for that particular shooting block and picking out various bits of, often very interesting trivia, before finishing on a full blown critical look at the story in question. Which is as good a way as any to do it and it certainly is very informative here. In these sections the writer might, for example, explore how ahead of it’s time, say, the fourth story is (the one with the man with no face coming out of photographs), where it’s implied that the main supporting protagonist (that is, other than the title characters), is actually a sex worker and strong, independent woman. Not a combination of qualities shown in a positive light that you would normally expect to see at the height of 1970s family TV viewing.

As a bonus to the six original stories that writer Richard Callaghan puts under the microscope here, he also goes a bit further with some additional sections for a quick, critical look and summation of all the other media which the title characters have appeared in... which, for this show, is a very short list. So, yeah, he also looks at the original paperback novelisation of the first story (also written by P. J. Hammond), the Sapphire And Steel Annual (for readers in other countries, an Annual is a British tradition consisting of a thin hardbound book of themed strips, stories and other activities which would be released for different licensed TV and comic properties every Christmas), the comic strip stories that appeared in Look In magazine and the three series of Big Finish CD audio plays starring David Warner as Steel and Susannah Harker as Sapphire. These are also invaluable chapters and serve to whet the appetite somewhat, although it’s a shame that stuff like the Look In strips haven’t been collected together and reprinted in the intervening decades.

All in all, though, a very welcome visit to the facts and figures that made up what was one of the most enthralling and spooky shows on British TV. There will be a lot of people of a certain age who will remember some of the somewhat uncompromising stories of Sapphire And Steel with a lot of affection and they, especially, are the people who I would recommend this book to. It’s not as long or as meaty as an authorised, fully illustrated, coffee table book look back at the show might have been but, in case that never happens, then this is definitely one people familiar with some of the material here covered will want to check out. Thanks to my friend Dr. Rob for grabbing this one for me for my birthday.

Star Trek V - The Final Frontier

Judgement Deity

Star Trek V - The Final Frontier
USA 1989
Directed by William Shatner
Paramount Blu Ray

Warning: Some spoilers here.

I first saw Star Trek V - The Final Frontier at a preview screening at the Empire cinema in London (before it became a multiplex and was one big screen, if memory serves me correctly). It was part of an all-nighter Star Trek screening, starting around about 8pm at night and finishing roughly at 6am the next morning. All four of the previous films were showing, with about 10-15 minutes between each screening... culminating in the premiere of this brand new movie. The cinema was packed out with people cheering and laughing at accidental sexual connotations in the dialogue of the earlier films and we had a laser show in the intervals between each movie. The atmosphere was electric. If you got hungry... well, you had to go grab hot dogs or pop corn and the queues for the loo between movies were staggering but, other than that, it was a pretty good time.

I went to that event with a friend who was totally into Star Trek (probably more enthusiastic and wide eyed/naive about the series than I was) who I haven’t seen or heard of for at least a decade now (which I kind of regret). I knew this movie was going to get a bad reception after we’d seen it because, although I’d had quite a good time with the fifth one, my friend Andy, who would never say a bad word about Star Trek, was... well he didn’t seem all that into it, to be honest.

I actually feel a little sorry for William Shatner here as I have a bit of a soft spot for this movie and don’t think it deserves the reception it got. He was up against massive budgetary cuts on things like special effects as a result of the writer’s strike in Hollywood and it really couldn’t have been easy to keep this thing afloat. Looking at it again now, I still quite enjoyed the movie and I think one of the producer’s comments on why it failed may have been quite on the mark. Star Trek - The Next Generation had been a TV series for two years already at this point... in fact some of the sets even found their way into this production... and with brand new episodes of this showing, fans may have been less interested in going back for repeat viewings of this one (which is what the box office for a movie really makes its money on) when they could catch up on the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC1701-D in the comfort of their own homes.

I’d argue now though, having see this one again, that it’s one of the stronger Star Trek movies in the franchise’s long history and, certainly, much better than a few of The Next Generation movies that came along later. This one is the only one of the movies to date, unless you count the recap at the start of Star Trek III - The Search For Spock (reviewed by me here) to have a pre-credits teaser sequence and it’s a pretty good opening. Here we meet the prime... well I won’t say he’s a villain because he really isn’t... here we meet the prime mover of the movie, Mr. Spock’s half brother Sybock (The Laughing Vulcan) who was outcast from his people because his pursuit of knowledge brought him to embrace emotion and he is now assembling a small army so he can lure a starship to take him to the centre of the universe to... well, to basically meet up with God. In a scene which is almost straight out of Lawrence Of Arabia in tone, we see him ride up to a fairly striking looking character and recruit him by making him face his ‘secret pain’ and sharing it... presumably using skills similar to the Vulcan mind meld which we’ve seen both Spock and Sarek use in the series in the past.

So basically we have a terrorist on a religious quest who rejects violence but is willing to look like he will stop at nothing to acquire the means to capture a starship and fly it straight to God, whom he saw in a vision. Along the way he recruits various people on his quest, including key members of the regular crew of the Enterprise and... the story is one where both heroes and villains are somewhat undefined with the one true bad guy of the piece being the ‘man upstairs’ who Sybock seeks and ultimately finds. Luckily, the shaky premise is given a shot in the arm because Sybock is played by a guy called Laurence Luckinbill who is absolutely perfect for the role, exhibiting just the kind of charisma you would want from somebody playing that kind of part and he seems more than enough of a person to give Kirk a run for his money. This was his last cinema movie but he still occasionally works in TV, apparently, and he’s also the son-in-law of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. He’s frankly brilliant and this movie would have been a lot worse if he’d not been in it.

But you know what else is brilliant about this movie?

Pretty much most of it. Yeah, I know I’m in a minority here but what do people have against Star Trek V? It’s got a bit of an anticlimactic ending, for sure, and that’s not the fault of William Shatner because the money was running out and the first attempt at some rock creatures chasing after Kirk just wasn’t working. However, it’s a good enough ending and the humour in the dialogue is at least the equal of the previous film, Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home (which I reviewed here). Added to that you have the regular cast doing what they do best and they’re all brilliant. Everyone gets a chance to shine in this one and they certainly have some great moments among them. We even have David Warner joining the cast as a ‘terran’ (or human) character... the first of three different species he played for Star Trek in one form or another, if I’m remembering correctly.

Spock looks, perhaps, a little over made up compared to what he usually gets in the movies, maybe a deliberate attempt to make him look closer to how he did in the original show... so, yeah, he looks a little like a stylised version of himself sometimes. A caricature of Leonard Nimoy playing Spock, almost... but I think it really works here actually and I wish they’d have kept that kind of look for future installments of the film series.

My one big problem with it is that the scene where Sybock shows Kirk, Spock and McCoy each other’s ‘secret pain’ makes him look a little too much like a wizard with special powers. How a simple Vulcan is able to conjure up this kind of audio/visual hallucinatory experience is not fully explained... so I thought the character lost a little credibility at this point in the proceedings but this is only a small element of the film and it isn’t too jarring with the rest of it.

Also, Jerry Goldsmith finally returns to the movie franchise with this one... after his unbelievably cool score for the first movie, ten years prior to this. I think what had happened there is that his main theme for the original had become popular again, since it had been used with smaller orchestration, as the opening theme tune to the Star Trek - The Next Generation TV show. For the show it was wedded to a new version of the old classic TV opening moments before leaping into Jerry’s well known theme and, for this return to the franchise, this is exactly what he does with it here... before going into some beautiful music detailing Kirk’s ascent of a mountain. The score to this movie is pretty cool and has some glorious action moments... don’t get me wrong, it’s no Star Trek The Motion Picture and lacks that score’s power but... it’s still a pretty great piece with a lot going for it. He also brings back his Klingon music which he used to score the opening of that first film, here used as a regular theme for a bored Klingon who wants to defeat Kirk in battle, and it’s an interesting version of the music as used here. Very dynamic with ‘wails and clickety clacks’* thrown into the mix in a pleasing way.

I can only assume that the slightly anti-climactic ending of this movie, coupled with the blurring between who are the heroes and who are the villains, are the other main culprits as to why the film performed abysmally at the box office... along with the fact that there was also brand new Star Trek on television at the time. All in all, though, I think this is a movie which is vastly maligned by its fan base and deserves to be rediscovered as the fun movie it is at some point. Hats of to director Shatner for this one... I think he did a grand job. It holds up pretty well, as far as I’m concerned... one of the fun movies.

*obviously a well known musical term.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond

Doctor Who - Cold War

Icing With Death

Doctor Who - Cold War
Airdate: 13th April 2013. UK. BBC1

Warning: Frosty spoilers lurking dangerously beneath the surface.

When I was a kid, there were three big monsters in Doctor Who and the rankings were mostly based on their recognition to the widest majority of people as harbingers of creepy menace and possible death in the show... and they went like this...

The number one enemies, of course, were The Daleks... who had been with the show since the second story of the very first series. The second most recognisable characters were, of course, the half-man, half-machine Cybermen, who had passed time with the show since the very last Hartnell story and who had turned up a lot in the Troughton years (curiously, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor only ever encountered the cybermen once, as a bit of a throwaway sequence in the anniversary story The Five Doctors... but the target novelisations were big in the 70s and kids really did know who the cybermen were... in no uncertain terms).

The third most recognisable “enemies” from the show, just a little ahead of The Master, the Sontarans and th Ogrons, were The Ice Warriors, who started out life appearing opposite Troughton’s Doctor a number of times and then continued into the Pertwee era with the two serialised Peladon stories, The Curse Of Peladon and The Monster Of Peladon. That last story dates from 1974 and, actually, that’s the last time we’ve properly seen them since then in anything other than a quick, flashback reference... almost 40 years ago (although the Tennant era story The Waters Of Mars does have some slight references to them both in dialogue and the partial look of the antagonists in that story, to be fair).

And then, last year (seemingly a fair few months before the story was showing up in the news... I don’t know how that happened), a friend of mine told me that they were bringing them back for the 2013 series of Doctor Who.

To be honest, I was kinda split in how I felt about that.

One of the things I’ve really not liked about the Matt Smith era of Doctor Who is that a couple of the redesigned alien creatures (or let’s call them monsters, shall we) have been absolutely terrible compared to their original incarnations. The Silurians, for example, though much more facially expressive than their Pertwee and Davison era incarnations, are pretty rubbish designs in comparison. And even the Daleks got kind of knobbled and turned into something much less scary and unwieldy in Matt Smith’s first season... so I really haven’t trusted the people behind the most recent production team on the show to really come up with a decent redesign. That finally changed, however, when I saw a photo of the new design a few months ago and thought it looked... well, pretty good actually. Looking much less like something they’ve wanted to downright change and back into the realms, again, of something they just want to tweak and improve a little for modern audiences of the show (the new Zygon design for the 50th anniversary story of the show to be broadcast in November also looks pretty good too, I have to say). Although the lack of hair at various joints bothers me just a little.

And now the episode is finally upon us, written by Mark Gatiss who I find a bit hit and miss on these things... and it was actually a pretty good episode.

Set entirely on a Russian nuclear submarine in the early 80s, the episode deals with a thawed out Ice Warrior (yeah, okay, they started off back in Troughton's time as a reference to The Thing From Another World and Gatiss uses that here as a nice little reference), a once great hero of his people who has been stranded in the ice for 5000 years and who wants, after he has been attacked by a jittery human, to wipe out the planet... lucky he just happens to be on a nuclear sub then.

The episode is nicely claustrophobic with The Doctor and Clara just happening to land on the submarine just as the “monster of the week” wakes up. The tension between these two new additions to the crew and the Russians is all quickly forgotten as The Doctor takes charge of the situation, with allowances for a few mistakes by the Russians along the way.

There were some good things about this week's story such as some overly enthusiastic red and green lighting in certain scenes, which looked like the BBC had hired Mario Bava and Dario Argento to work on the episode and, this weeks installment did indeed have a couple of big time movie actors amongst the crew of Russians... namely David Warner and Liam Cunningham. The real eye opener, though, was the neat trick of revealing that the Ice Warriors as we usually see them are actually clothed in armour (something which could be seen as something of a contradiction in some ways since, in the old days, they did occasionally wear helmets over what we are now told is their armour) and then having the armour open up and “something” getting out and running amok. We only ever see its hands and, for a little while, it’s head... but this is more than enough to keep things scary and I’m sure Gatiss and co are not exactly unaware of how much like George Pal’s martians from his 50s movie version of H. G. Well’s War Of The Worlds this level of the "reveal" is and how it will affect the audience. Very creepy and appropriate for an episode of Doctor Who, I must say.

There were, however, a couple of clunkers in the episode too... as far as I could make out.

Number one is... why have the captain ban The Doctor from going to talk to the Ice Warrior and instead have his new companion do it with The Doctor talking through a headset? Yeah, okay, I know... for dramatic reasons. But, honestly... it made no sense.

Second gripe is... the TARDIS disappears to get itself out of trouble almost immediately at the start of the episode, stranding The Doctor and Clara in the submarine with the Russians and their new martian acquaintance. However, it relocated to the opposite pole of the planet so... how the bleepity bleep bleep was it still able to translate The Doctor and Clara into perfect Russian for the crew and vice versa? We’ve certainly not been told that the translation circuits (or whatever they're called) have got anything like that kind of range before. I’d just assumed when it disappeared at the start that it was lurking somewhere close... so that was either a bit of an oversight or carelessly insulting the intelligence of the audience as far as I’m concerned. That element of the plot seemed a little lazy to me, truth be told.

But, honestly, I’m kinda just nit picking here. It was a pretty great episode of Doctor Who (which is not bad considering how “Series 7” has been playing so far both last year and this year), so I’m thrilled we got another good one out of it and, also, very clear evidence that the Ice Warrior is not alone and that his race are all still alive and kicking. So I’m sure they’ll be back in their droves either in the last episode of this series or perhaps as one of many sets of aliens (possibly) in the 50th anniversary story when it airs. Time will tell.

In the meantime, next weeks episode looks nice and “old school” spooky so I’m looking forward to that one now, too.  But as far as greeting an old foe back goes... it was “Ice to see you”.

Tron Voyage

Tron 1982 US

Directed by Steven Lisberger

Disney Region 2

Tron was a well hyped movie when I was a teen. I remember all the furore over the “ground-breaking” computer animation effects which, way before the movie even opened, had ushered in expectations from people all over the world that any movies which were dealing with “cutting edge” themes like computer games would, from now on, look “exactly like Tron.” No! Really! In the early 80s computer games really were thought of as cutting edge! This was only four years after the birth of Space Invaders don’t forget... and people’s jaws were dropping and their eyes were popping out of their heads at just seeing little pixilated blobs invading your lone defender of the earth at the bottom of the screen. Tron was like the ultimate that special effects movies could achieve or ever could achieve as far as pretty much everyone on the planet was concerned. This was way beyond what most people had even dreamt of.

And it was a movie that seemed to be on everyone’s lips in the media. I even remember much loved Radio and Video DJ/comedian Kenny Everett giving it a good review and admitting he’d liked it so much on pirate video the year before, that he was even going to go and see it again at the cinema when it was released - can you imagine the kind of stony silence that would follow a comment like that on British TV today? But these were the days when all the local kids in the UK had seen E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial on video almost a year before it was released in the cinemas over here. So it was a comment very much of its time... just like Tron was and is, very much a movie of its time.

And of course, in all this hype you can bet that not too much mention was made of the plot or, more obviously, the narrow skeleton of one on which to hang state-of-the-art special effects. Nor was the premise of a man being sucked into a computer and interacting with the “little men inside who are programs and run the computer” considered as any way näive. Back then, computers were still very much of a mystery and, even though most kids had started getting ZX Spectrums, BBC Micros or Commodore 64s in their homes, the adults who were not at school attending the quaintly named Computer Studies lessons had no idea what was in these little black and white boxes... as their kids used the latest technology to make a little animated miner jump around bizarre little platforms grabbing keys while trying hard not to get captured by a penguin or some other, less obvious animated nemesis of the main character.

So nobody thought much about the plot when we all finally went to see Tron at the cinema. I watched it again the other week in preparation for the new one and I have to say that... um... certain parts of it haven’t aged all that well. The acting is very uneven with most of the cast such as David Warner and Bruce Boxleitner (in the title role) acting very wooden and, supposedly, what high tech programmers would presumably act like in the eyes of the post-Asteroids public. Contrasted against this is Jeff Bridges acting style which is, in this one and to be fair and polite to the man who has turned out to be one of the great actors of his generation, a little over exuberant to say the least. But this is what "hackers" were supposed to be like, right? All Han Solo with a modem instead of a blaster.

All in all, there’s not much plot to spoil here, hence the lack of my usual warning. Bridges’ character Flynn goes into the computer and with the aid of Tron, they ride light cycles and battle to save the computer world from an evil programme who wants to control all computers in the “real” world and subvert humanity to its binary-encoded will. Sparkly special effects showcasing the latest Disney animated effects are what the story is all about and, even in the publicity leading up to its first screenings, this was in no way played down or even thought of to be an inherently bad thing for a movie like this to aspire to... and nobody really minded at all to be honest.

So how does it hold up today? Well lets just say that it’s not worn too badly... but it has aged and parts of it are very clunky. Some of those “new computer age of mankind” effects still look great... and some of them actually look surprisingly ropy and very much in the style of standard Disney animation - but that’s not something which would have been noticed at the time because even that animation was pretty good for contemporary expectations of the other stuff and the subtle differences are just not something we were, as a collective audience, sophisticated enough to notice at the time. Films do change over the years because of the way we, as a society, bring ourselves to the experience of viewing a movie (hence the phenomenon of nostalgia) and when you look at Tron today you have to remember it in the context of the film’s original audience if you are going to find anything worthwhile in it. I watched it again the other week with the memories of being a part of that original audience who experienced it in cinemas and even I was disappointed by a few sequences in the movie which just don’t hold up to closer scrutiny these days.

Also, the film has a kick ass score by composer Wendy Carlos (who pioneered the use of electronic music as a classical instrument in the days when s/he was Walter Carlos and churning out ground breaking albums like Switched on Bach... readers here might best remember her for her contributions to Stanley Kubrik’s films A Clockwork Orange and the powerful and terrifying music from the opening sequence of The Shining). It’s a shame that the studio hasn’t tapped her to provide the score for the sequel... I’ve got nothing against Daft Punk (don’t know their music) but it would have been nice if some of the leitmotifs from the first movie were retained for the new one.

All in all though, Tron is a big, dumb effects movie from a time when Star Wars had inadvertently created a celluloid environment where special effects were reason enough to go and see a movie, regardless or plotting, pacing, acting or editing. It does pretty much what it’s supposed to and if you're retro enough to appreciate it in spite of its more obvious flaws then you’ll probably have a blast with it.

As for the new sequel... well I’m looking forward to it. I’m pretty sure it’s still going to be a big, dumb effects movie with a silly plot and some irrational leaps of faith required of the audience but... so what! This kind of movie has it’s place. I’ll be going to see it soonest I can.

Omen Holiday

The Omen Pentology Box

666 Warning of the Beast: This article contains devilish spoilers.

Ok... It’s been literally decades since I saw the original Omen trilogy and I’d never seen Omen 4 or the remake released on the 6th day of the 6th month of 2006... and what with every horror movie blogger on twitter going nuts about Halloween I thought I might as well jump on the rickety band-hearse and have a go at a horror movie blog too. Although I do feel it a bit strange doing something for such a dubious occasion because the truth is, when I was a child growing up in the late 60s/early 70s, Halloween was never really an event over here in the UK... in fact it barely got a mention and certainly we weren’t plagued by trick or treaters or encouraged to watch various horror movies to celebrate said non-event. I wasn’t even allowed to frolic naked in the woods and plunge my dagger bloodthirstily into an undefiled virgin as a sign of my willingness to sacrifice the pure in heart for a prosperous and everlasting life... let alone dress up in a dodgy costume and threaten people for sweets in a kind of ritualistic, monster endorsed protection scam. In fact, the only real reference I saw to Halloween each year was when the Sunday edition of The Observer would drop through our door and I would turn to that “special” page near the back and read about Linus and Sally waiting in the pumpkin patch all night, looking out for The Great Pumpkin.

But as usual, I digress.

So anyway... I racked my brains with what to watch and I remembered I’d not seen all The Omen movies and figured out, as an extra special treat, I’d watch them all back to back on the weekend before Halloween so I can write some kind of long and winding and hopefully, at least, marginally entertaining review of them which I can try to complete so people can read it in time for Halloween if they so desire. But the real clincher for this deal, the real deciding factor on this was... oh, bugger it. Alright, here’s what happened. I went to the Camden Film Fair and saw a copy of the 6 disc set of the five Omen films (The Omen Pentology) going for a measly five quid... so I bought the darn things and figured they’d be good blog material for this bizarre Halloween thingy everybody seems to be making a fuss about again this year... okay? You dragged it out of me.

But just so you don’t feel irritated about my incredible cheapness at having purchased all these films for just a miserable £5, please realise that I stuck through watching all five of these movies as the quality of them deteriorated exponentially as the series progressed. Back-to-back with an overnight sleep after three of them for the pretension of preserving my own sanity. So it’s not like I didn’t do some work here! Anyone who’s seen Omen 4 will probably know what I’m talking about here and hopefully sympathise. Anyway, on with the show...

The Omen 1976 US

Directed by Richard Donner

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

I remember seeing this on TV when I was 10 or 11 and absolutely loving it. 30 or more years later... I still think this is a great movie and I can see why it had such an impact and garnered such box office success on its release. Mind you, if it hadn’t been a hit, we’d have never have had to sit through Omen 4... um... no, still glad they made the first one, regardless of the consequences of their success.

If you don’t know the story of The Omen then you probably aren’t into horror films and you should probably be reading one of my other blogposts instead of this lengthy piece. Let me just do a quick run down of major iconic elements for those of you who haven’t indulged... just the basics...

Okay...baby killed and swapped for Jackal’s spawn born at time of baby’s death. Son of the devil goes home with new British ambassador and called Damian. He has a 666 birthmark on his head. People know son of satan is around and want him dead. People die in devilish and cunning ways. British ambassador realises truth and goes to kill son but is shot dead by police instead. Damian is adopted and rises to power to be Devil born from politics to destroy the world... yada, yada, yada.

Okay, I’ve been trying to pick apart some of the reasons why the very first Omen movie worked so well whereas the sequels... really didn’t, and I’ve come up with the fact that The Omen has a kind of mystery element to it. The great actor David Warner plays a photo-journalist and his snaps of people show distortions on the prints which predict their violent deaths. Gregory Peck plays Ambassador Thorn and when he teams up with David Warner to find out just what the heck the violently deceased priest played by Doctor Who legend Patrick Troughton has been going on about, you are really rooting for the characters and willing them to put all the supernatural jigsaw puzzle pieces together in their heads. I remember as a child being absolutely on the edge of my seat when each new photograph and clue was followed up. This is a dimension the sequels are sadly lacking but, to be fair to them, you already know all the answers by the end of the first movie so you really can’t introduce much of a mystery element into the material after that point.

It’s a really well written (by David Seltzer) little horror movie and the performances are, quite frankly, all superb and you’ve got a brilliant cast so it’s really not surprising. In addition to the three acting legends I mentioned in my last paragraph, you also have Lee Remick, Billie Whitelaw and Leo McKern added to the mix. Seriously folks, on an acting level this film cannot fail.

So good script, good acting. What else?

Well, something I never noticed the last time I watched it (probably because in the late 70s they would have been showing it in ‘orrible pan and scan on TV) is the composition of the shots in this first one. Donner’s a great director but I don’t know much about his key visual signatures... but what I did notice in this one is that nearly all the shot compositions in this film (apart from one where Damian runs into Lee Remick on his bike and terminates her pregnancy by knocking her to a long fall from a flight or two up) are pitched to the right of the screen. Almost everything runs in perspective to the right of the shot... an effect which works consistently and well throughout the running time. I’d be really interested, time permitting, in going back to some other Donner films to see if they’re put together in the same way. Because this one just works so well.

And then of course there’s the music! The late, great Jerry Goldsmith composed a lot of movie scores in his long career and received his fair share of Oscar nominations over the years... and rightly so. His score for The Omen is phenomenal and influential (in the worst way) and it’s the one time in his entire career that he actually won that Oscar. There’s a great and sweeping Hollywood love theme but the most remembered sequences are those where he’s got a choir chanting latin lyrics, often set to a jaunty rhythm which maybe shouldn’t quite work... but actually does work really well. It’s unsettling and breeds anxiety in the viewer and really serves the film well. It’s not non-stop like scores these days... in fact it’s quite a short score. Jerry Goldsmith was a master of spotting soundtracks (spotting is the art of choosing which sequences of a film to write a musical cue for and which to leave unscored) and it really shows in this film with great, long sequences left unscored, allowing for the dread filled sequences to carry a greater impact on the viewer.

I said Jerry’s score was influential in the worst way and that’s because, every time now somebody want’s to do a parody of The Omen they use Orff’s O Fortuna from Carmina Burana... and the reason they do this is, for some reason, people think this is the music used in The Omen. No... it’s not even close in structure, melody or tempo and I’m always left wondering who it is that thinks Jerry’s score is even remotely similar to Orff’s signature piece. I’ve even seen Classics meet the Movies style albums include the Orff piece and claim it’s from The Omen on the track listings... madness!

Goldsmith’s score would exert a very long reaching influence on all of the subsequent movies in the series, even the ones he didn’t score, as you will see later.

Okay... so if you’re a fan of horror movies, The Omen is a great movie to sink your Halloween fangs into. Which brings us to...

Damien: Omen 2 1978 US

Directed by Don Taylor and Mike Hodges

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

The one really good thing about Damien: Omen 2 hits you like a ton of bricks as soon as the movie starts... and that is Mr. Goldsmiths follow up score. If The Omen score got him the Oscar, this movie should have got him a knighthood. It’s even better than the score to the first movie... it’s like The Omen on viagra. Fast syncopated rhythms mixed with haunting and often aggressive vocal chanting... it pounds your musical soul like a strong tide pounds away at a cliffs edge. Truly beautiful and sometimes disturbing music. The vocal motif for the “crow” which is one of Damian’s familiars, is true genius.

That being said... there’s a lot not to like about this movie. As that pounding masterpiece seduces it’s way into your eardrums, we join Leo McKern as he races to join Ian Hendry to get the seven daggers which will kill Damien. These are the daggers that he gave good ol’ Gregory Peck to do the deed with and it was established in the first film that you need all seven to kill off Damian... the first to extinguish the life and then the other six radiating out from the first piercing to destroy the soul... take note of that because they really screw that up in the next movie. My whole problem with this opening sequence where McKern and Hendry get buried alive in sand is that this little prologue to the main narrative is supposed to take place only about 8 weeks after the end of the first movie... but Leo McKerns hair and make up look very little like they did in the first one. Seriously, the continuity between how he looked in the first one and how he looks in the second one is seriously screwed.

After this sequence the film jumps several years in time... Damian is in Military Academy and is now living with Gregory Peck's brother as his new father figure, played by William Hurt. This film is all about Damian discovering his demonic inheritance and killing all those who get in the way of his family fortune of wealth and political power. Where he had Billie Whitelaw playing his “devil’s protector” figure Mrs. Blaylock in the first one... and a really big dog, here we have a young Lance Henricksen (Yay! Frank Black’s in an Omen movie) playing a similar role along with a crow and... you know... a really big dog. Unfortunately, having Lance Henrickson in this movie really does nothing to save it.

The first film is notable for it’s violent deaths presented as gory set pieces... but they were well paced and made sense and held interest in the context of the growing mystery of the photographs. Unfortunately, this film seems to be trying to give you even gorier or nasty deaths (woman with eyes pecked out and run over by truck, guy cut in half by lift cable etc.) without really having any need or emotional context to them. It really does seem to be a few set pieces hung together for the sake of having them in there and this really doesn’t serve the film very well... which is appropriate because there is no real story, the shot set-ups are fairly run of the mill (to these tired old eyes anyway) and it’s just, plainly speaking, an uninteresting watch.

Which is a shame but, seriously, other than the music it’s a dull watch... just not as dull as...

The Final Conflict: Omen 3 1981 US

Directed by Graham Baker

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

Yeah this one’s terrible. Damian is all grown up now and, like his pseudo-father, becomes the British Ambassador based in London. He manages this by using his demonic ways to influence the death of the current Brit Ambassador who sets a press conference so that when the door to his office is opened, a shotgun blows his head off. I was quite surprised to see that his secretary was played by a young, uncredited Ruby Wax and it is she, herself, who inadvertently pulls the trigger on her boss.

Actually this movie could have done with a few more sequences like this in it. You remember I said the last film seemed like gory set pieces written in and glued together for the sake of having them? Well this film has hardly any of those kinds of scenes and you really do miss them. The Final Conflict: Omen 3 is a dull plod of a movie which deals with Damien’s King Herrod-like reaction to stop the son of God being born into the world... but the pay off to that... the scene where you want to see the Devil and God battling in evil confrontation... a final conflict, if you will, just doesn’t happen. At the end of the movie Damien just gets stabbed with one of those knives and dies. Good triumphs over evil and the credits roll.

And about those daggers people. A sect of good guys (one played by Tony Vogel of Dick Barton fame) who are there to make sure the son of God is born and Damian fails are each given one of the daggers so each can make their own assassination attempt on Damien... but we know from the previous two films that this just isn’t going to work, right? You need all seven to get the job done, remember? This just best serves to demonstrate just how poor the writing has gotten by the time of the third movie... which is a shame because that very first movie was really something special.

By this time, the familiar trap of recurring horror films with lengthy character arcs has happened and a lesson could be learned from watching Universal’s old Mummy series in regards to this. If these first three films are supposed to take place over the space of, say, 20 years... how come they are always set in the time contemporary to their release? What’s up with that?

And I’ll bet you can guess what the one good thing about this movie was now. Yep! Goldsmith’s score is a far cry from his scores to the previous two pictures in tone and style but it’s still a corker of a score. I think it’s on a level with some of his work on Poltergeist and maybe the Vger music from his Star Trek: The Motion Picture score. Whatever the style is though... it’s another winner and I think the differences occur because there is a sense of hope and lightness all the way through this one which wasn’t really prevalent in the first two movies. This was the last Omen film Goldsmith specifically scored but... well hold on, let’s not get ahead of myself...

The Omen 4: Awakenings 1991 US

Directed by Jorge Montesi, Dominique Othenin-Girard

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

Omen 4: Awakenings is a made-for-TV movie which had limited success and was, I believe, released theatrically in some countries... although I don’t remember it ever getting any kind of broadcast or screening over here in this country.

Or, to put it another way...

Omen 4 is a preposterous movie which really tries hard in places and attempts to establish a bond with the audience through some of the characters but ultimately fails on many levels.

The Devil’s son is replaced in this one with the Devil’s daughter and the main female protagonist who plays the mother who adopts this child at birth, is played by none other than Faye Grant, who older readers may remember played the charismatic resistance leader in the original miniseries and follow up series of V on TV. But even she cannot save this awful excuse for an entry into the Omen series.

And the one thing which totally does more to kill it than anything else is Jonathan Sheffer’s unbelievably inappropriate score. Seriously... it needs to be heard in the context of the movie to be believed but I bet it makes a great stand alone listen for fans of Carl Stalling’s work. Almost the entire show is Mickey Mousing it (Mickey Mousing is the term for music which is designed to catch and highlight on-screen action) and the net effect is that you have this seriously comic score playing all over the damned thing and making it sound like a Tom and Jerry cartoon (and I have nothing against Tom and Jerry music, have a CD soundtrack of that stuff myself). It’s like the studio executives just said to the composer, “This stuff is too dark for us. Can you lighten the mood somewhat so we can sell more Hallmark moments during the commercial breaks please?”

And when they’re not playing Mr. Sheffer’s score, they track in a bunch of cues “needledrop” style from Jerry Goldsmith’s first and third Omen scores... sometimes with a little overdub of electronics by Sheffer on top. This method of scoring reaches it’s laugh out loud funniest moment when a private detective is about to be demonically killed and he’s having hallucinations in the street. He looks up to see a group of hooded pseudo monks lip synching the latin chants from Goldsmith’s Omen score and, quite frankly, I was bouncing with laughter at this point. What the f---? Is this supposed to be a comedy?

At the end of this shambling, comic zombie of a movie, Faye Grant is demonically influenced to shoot herself through the head and the devil’s spawn is waiting in the wings to return in a further sequel which, thankfully, the studios never bothered to inflict on us. Good for them... but that wasn’t the end of the Omen’s diabolical grasp for the cinema box office...

The Omen 2006 US

Directed by John Moore

20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

On the sixth day of the sixth month of 2006, Fox released their re-make of the original film. Now I almost went to the cinema to see this because, although I mostly tend to steer away from modern remakes, the initial teaser trailer for this one showing a young Damian playing on the swings who then turns slightly to look dead into camera was quite eerily done and shows a certain cinematic competence (it’s a shame in a way that this little sequence isn’t in the final movie). I can’t quite remember why I never got to get to the last showing before it left my local cinema but I suspect sex was involved somewhere along the line. I could either go to the last screening of The Omen or travel many miles to my (then) girlfriends house and have a weekend full of bizarre, demonic sex... as usual in these things, sex won out on that particular occasion.

Thing is though... it’s not a bad remake now I come to look at it... it’s just completely unnecessary. Here’s the stats on it...

1. David Seltzer, who wrote the original movie back in 1976, is once again credited as being the writer on this one. That’s because the script on this one is almost, word for word with the odd exception here and there (possibly improvised or changed around by an actor) identical to the original one from the first movie. It’s framed from different angles and some of the locales are changed but, ultimately, it’s like watching a new movie run off from the exact same template. One or two differences like a zoo replacing Windsor Safari Park (from the first one) and a slightly different, but no less grim decapitation scene are changes but other than that it’s pretty much a total rerun.

2. The actors in this are major talents and all do a great job except... they are not as great or legendary as the original cast who you are always going to compare them to. You have Liev Schreiber playing Gregory Peck, Julia Stiles playing Lee Remick, Peter Postlethwaite playing Patrick Troughton, David Thewliss (one of my favourite actors) playing David Warner, Mia Farrow playing Billie Whitelaw and Michael Gambon playing Leo McKern. They’re all seriously good too... just not as serious as the originals.

3. Marco Beltrami’s score is excellent but is typical of modern horror scoring. He’s favoured leaving any choral chanting behind and going for sinister and atonal with the odd bit of rhythm and melody... and it works really well. However... why go to that effort when you are going to have six piano notes in one scene, where Liev Shreiber sees the news story of the skewered priest, lifted directly from the sinister lead into Goldsmith’s original main theme, which was a piano rendition of the love theme The Piper Dreams? No other musical reference in there except during the end credits where the original, latin chanting Ave Santani theme is briefly rearranged about halfway through. Why? Do you really want people to compare one of the greatest scores ever written for an American horror movie with a piece of 21st century horror scoring. Jerry always wins... he has the devil on his side.

OK, so it was worth it for me to see this remake to just see what kind of spin David Thewlis was going to give to the David Warner character but ultimately... it really didn’t need to be redone. But I can see why they did it. Releasing it on 6/6/06 was a bit of a marketing opportunity that you can only waste once!

All in all, I quite enjoyed rewatching, in my own perverse way, these movies for my Halloween “celebration”. The first film will get a spin again in a year or two. And the second and third are tolerable for their tap-your-feet-along-video-jukebox-style appeal with Jerry’s golden scores. But ultimately I can’t recommend any of these movies bar that first one... but it’s a strong recommend for that first one if you’ve never scene it before. The way Richard Donner builds up tension and suspense is riveting.

Take a look... but keep one eye out for sharp, spiky, falling objects!