Word: damien
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Remember those home movies your crazy uncle would show at big family events? Everyone would gather round the screen to laugh at Aunt Bertha's swollen thighs, smirk at cousin Damien's antics, and smile at Grandma Smith's sweet girlishness as she shied from the camera's probing lens. Everyone was thrilled and secretly proud and yet vaguely terrified to see themselves caught and fixed on screen...
...conversion is aided by a cast variegated in color and comedy: a king built on the order of a mahogany tree; his impudent adviser Hannibal, who addresses his majesty as Kingy; the irreverent Reverend Judith Longnecker, billed as "the perfect Christian guerrilla"; and the mandatory beauty, Audrey Damien, daughter of a mad old Irishman who is editor of the Zenkali Voice, the island's sole newspaper. In the course of exploration, Peter and Audrey stumble upon a lost valley inhabited by the rara avis itself...
Part of the problem is that little Damien has miraculously aged almost a decade in the two years since we left him tearless at his parents' grave, a nominal orphan at five. That angelic-looking child - so hard to believe Satan had anything to do with him! - is now a broody cadet in a military school. Though the deviltry goes somewhat further than short-sheeting the beds or spreading rumors about saltpeter in the food, there is still not enough contrast between Damien's visible aspect and his true nature to make him either lively or ironic...
Beyond that, the film makers have disastrously erred by telling their story in a bluntly objective manner. One reason the original worked so nicely was that events unfolded mainly from the point of view of Damien's disbelieving parents. Even after they began to see that there was something fishy about their offspring, they still had to discover the hard way just how large was the conspiracy of devil's disciples assigned to protect the secret of his origins and mission. In the new movie most of Damien's protectors telegraph their satanic allegiance the minute they...
...record, Lee Grant plays Holden's wife, the veterans Sylvia Sidney and Lew Ayres are present as early victims of the devil's ire. Damien and his cousin, who seems to represent heaven-inspired goodness, are played by Jonathan Scott-Taylor and Lucas Donat. In the end, Damien survives, for no good reason except the producers' hopes to squeeze one more sequel out of him. It is, of course, possible that they are Beelzebub's agents in a new strategy of boring us so profoundly that we will turn to evil to cheer ourselves...