film | Who's your daddy?

Dear Hollywood,

Stop. It. With. The. Damn. Horror. Flicks. That. Feature. Creepy. Children. Thanks in advance.

Love and kisses,

Jamie.

OK, so director John Moore (Flight of the Phoenix) clearly ignored the memo. But you've gotta give him a teensy-weensy bit of credit for opting to revisit THE OMEN — that 1976 zenith of creepy-child endeavors — in lieu of simply polluting multiplexes with a brand new piece of stink starring a kid who talks to dead people or is a dead person or has some strange connection to the the dead populace (i.e., The Grudge and Hide and Seek and The Ring Two and Silent Hill). And yet Moore's Omen utilizes the same David Seltzer screenplay as Richard Donner's original, meaning it's less a proper remake than a scene-for-scene homage, so you're often left wondering: A) what the point is; and B) if this incarnation exists simply because studio honchos thought it'd be too cute to capitalize on a devlish June 6, 2006 — 6/6/06, get it? — release date.

Liev Schreiber (the Scream series) and Julia Stiles (Save the Last Dance) nab the Gregory Peck and Lee Remick roles of an American diplomat and his preggers wife, awaiting the birth of their first baby in Great Britain. Long story short, members of a covert demonic sect instigate a hospital switcheroo that leaves Schreiber and Stiles the parents of little Damien, the most cherubic harbinger of the apocalypse since Sean Preston Spears — or, in the immortal words of Sidney Blackmer in the classic occult chiller Rosemary's Baby, "He has his father's eyes. Hail Satan!" In the film's craftiest moments, actually, Mia Farrow — yep, Rosemary herself — oozes deliciously diabolical glee as the kind of sinister nanny who'd totally ram that spoonful of sugar up Mary Poppins' ass before ripping her to shreds with her bare hands.

Schreiber and David Thewlis (Professor Lupin from Harry Potter), as a sleuthing paparazzo, share an amiable rapport when late-in-the-game globe-trotting takes them from misty monasteries to gothic graveyards, uncovering hokey plot revelations — those devious Satan-worshipers leave quite the unholy paper trail — as they hurdle through Moore's occasionally effective shock sequences. But Stiles is sourly miscast as the distressed young mother, and while little Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, as Damien at six years old, glowers like he's auditioning for The Kenneth Starr Story, his pint-sized Antichrist never becomes much of a character. His sullen stare elicits a nice chuckle, though, in the movie's final scene, which is either meant as a (funny) jab at the Bush administration or a set-up for the inevitable Omen 2: Satanic Boogaloo. Omen '76 spawned three sequels and a made-for-TV documentary, so consider yourself warned. C