Ominous (2015)

Directed by Peter Sullivan [Other horror films: Summoned (2013), High School Possession (2014), The Sandman (2017), Cucuy: The Boogeyman (2018)]

I’ll first say that this will be a shorter review than usual – I’ve seen Ominous twice now, and really, it’s not worth extrapolating on. Really, there’s only about one reason to see it, and that’s for a hilariously bad death scene. Everything else had been done before, and ultimately, this made-for-TV flick is just bland and pretty God-awful.

The cast is almost wholly poor. Mark Lindsay Chapman (who played Nick in The Langoliers, a fact I didn’t realize until after the movie finished) was the best of the bunch, and he had a solid, moderately sinister presence. None of the other performances did anything for me. There’s a few interesting names here, such as Barry Watson, who starred in 7th Heaven for quite some time, and Esmé Bianco, who I know mostly as a supporting character from Game of Thrones, but their acting didn’t come close to wowing me here.

A lot of the fault, though, can go to the uninspired plot. I just don’t get why anyone would want to see this film, in which bereft parents make a deal with the devil to raise their recently-deceased son from the dead, only to discover he’s the Antichrist, when they could stick with a classic like The Omen, or even a different take on the story, like the 2017 Little Evil. It’s a bad, low-budget television movie (which really shows in it’s special effects failures), so I just don’t get why anyone would opt into watching this willingly.

Admittedly, I’ve seen it now twice. Luckily, there are a few terrifically horrible scenes that make at least portions of this film bearable. In a classic sequence, a priest gets clobbered over the head by a falling cross, and then set on fire. In another, multiple people die from flying projectiles at a park. And then we have the bird attacks at the end – while slightly better-looking than Birdemic (which isn’t actually praise, believe it or not), the birds were horribly rendered, and it just looked so God-damned awful.

Which, when it comes down to it, is what this movie is. Ominous (which, by the way, is a terribly bland title) just sucks hard. It’s one of those modern-day television flicks which just reeks of pointlessness. As fun as some of the sequences are, it’s definitely not worth it to watch the whole of this film.

3/10