• Written and directed by Nick Everhart, based on characters created by Ben Henry
• Starring
  • Chad Mathews
  • Makinna Ridgway
  • Amol Shah
  • Alma Saraci
  • Collin Brock
• Produced by David Michael Latt
• Executive produced by David Rimawi

Sharing only an assistant director and a couple of producers with the 2006 movie 666: The Child, this sequel proves itself quite a different movie. The first one was a calculated attempt to cash in on the remake of The Omen (which, it turns out, didn’t do quite well enough for anything to ride on its coattails), and as such, 666: The Child was predictable, unimaginative, and derivative. By contrast, 666: The Beast is more notable for being cheap, poorly cast, inconsistent, derivative of a wider range of movies, and incontestably silly. And not just silly in a garden-variety B-movie way, or even silly in the manner one expects from The Asylum productions; thanks to the subject matter, this movie also manages to be theologically silly, a rare achievement. And they say that creativity is dead in Hollywood….

The subject at hand is, of course, the Antichrist Donald, who was in the previous movie portrayed by Boo Boo Stewart as a pre-adolescent of indeterminate racial background and unsettlingly good looks. When we fast-forward to age thirty (ignore the technology date-stamping each movie and just roll with it, okay?), Donald is now played by Chad Mathews, who is a balding Caucasian nebbish. Completely gone is the quiet reserve and confidence of the juvenile spawn of Satan, and with it any memory that Donald had, in the previous movie, engineered through supernatural means the deaths of his adoptive father, mother, grandfather, dentist, father’s best friend, an entire church-run orphanage, and a passenger jet. (I guess he’s also forgotten his devil-worshiping and sexually-inappropriate nanny, which is frankly harder to believe than all the rest.) The ending of the first movie strongly intimated that Donald was going to rise to power and prominence via his adoptive aunt, a Martha Stewart type with her own media empire, but we soon learn that she has also died “accidentally” in the interim.

Another Evening at the Improv ends in tragedy.

So now Donald’s just a corporate cog with none of the devilish charisma that general popular culture or the precedent of the first movie would indicate. He and his wife Kate (Makinna Ridgway) are expecting their first child any day, and Donald has his stomach in knots about his possible promotion to Director of Operations at Globalcorp.

Things get off to a bang when Kate’s twin sister Sarah (Ridgway again) is murdered at the hospital where she works. In fact, as we get to see, she’s crucified on the wall, by a cadaver which sits up on a gurney and yet from which she does not run screaming. Almost concurrent with that, Donald meets about his promotion with Senior VP Ashmed Chammadai (Amol Shah) — whom we recognize as having been the corpse which murdered Sarah. This, I submit to you, is nonsensical; Chammadai (whose name is never mentioned once during the movie, by the way; I can only share it with you thanks to the closing credits) is shown to be very much alive, thank you, and the logistical overtime necessary to catch Sarah alone in the hospital morgue really doesn’t speak well to the efficiency of the infernal powers.

“You wanna see my Al Pacino? I’m doing my Al Pacino!”

What’s more, Chammadai butters Donald up with declarations like, “You’re special, Donald! You have that fire! That intensity!” This is the most extreme example of an Informed Attribute I’ve seen recently, as all we’ve seen of Donald’s characters is that he’s borderline whiny and not 100% sure of himself. Nevertheless, seeing something in Donald that we can’t, he offers him a position of Junior VP. With the job he gets the requisite sexpot assistant (Alma Saraci) who will of course help him sully his marital vows, and an executive office that we only see in the background of tight closeups on the characters, mainly because what we see looks more like some cheap woodgrain-paneled version of hell than a sweet corporate setup.

Kate instantly gets unstable and moody thanks to Sarah’s murder and Donald’s devotion to his new position (plus, hey, pregnancy), and it’s into this unsettled life that Vatican special investigator Father Deacon Cain (Collin Brock) arrives. From the first moment he opened his mouth, I was moved to prayer; I said, “Please let him be the worst actor in this movie.” And lo, my prayer was answered! Not that there was much anyone could have done with the part; a cassocked priest roaming Los Angeles, ranting at a moment’s notice about dark powers and chosen ones, would be tough for anyone. And get a load of that name; not only is “Cain” one of the least comforting surnames for a religious authority figure, but “Deacon”? If I were a professional clergyman whose given name just happened to be the name of another office of the priesthood, I probably would leave it out when I introduced myself, instead of referring to myself every time as “Father Deacon Caine.” It’s like having a senator whose first name is “Congressman.”

“Porta-confessions! No waiting!”

Father Caine brings the theological silly with him. He knows intuitively that Kate, like her twin sister, has a small cross-shaped birthmark on her neck, and that she is therefore Chosen. Chosen for what, you ask? How about this: Chosen to be the mother of Jesus Christ as he’s born again as a baby. That’s right, the predestined mother of God and the Antichrist just happen to be husband and wife! How do you like them odds?

While Kate is trying to alternately ignore or deal with what Father Cain tells her (she really doesn’t do much before the final reel except to shudder and to hallucinate about demonic homeless people), Donald slides down the slope from corporate nebbish to absolute eeeevil so fast you’d swear the DVD skipped a chapter. Chammadai is in a crunch because he can’t find the essential contract paperwork from a deal the company set up in Israel (ding ding ding!) five years ago, so Donald takes it upon himself to fake the paperwork. Then he sleeps with his assistant in celebration, and it’s not like he had to be talked into it; although she’s been making herself passively available with streetwalker makeup and tight skirts, it’s definitely his idea to start stroking her leg after a couple of glasses of the bubbly. And when office creep Tom (Stephen Blackehart) wants to blackmail Donald with evidence of his tryst, Donald first chokes him and then tosses him down the stairs, breaking his neck.

He seriously has lighting like this in his office?

To which Chammadai responds, You’re the Antichrist! You’re allowed to! All it takes is an apocalyptic pep talk, and Donald’s ready to comb his hair back (for eeevil effect, of course) and drink the blood of virgins, literally. Chammadai even takes him to see “his followers,” which look like a dozen robed figured with candles whose numbers are (not very convincingly) disguised by quick edits and dubbed-in crowd noises. I’d be surprised if there were even as many cultists present as there were members of the Manson “family.” And all Donald has to do to ascend to his infernal birthright, according to Chammadai, is kill the infant Christ just as he’s born, with a special knife (one of those “collector’s cutlery” split-bladed jobs that comes with its own mounting board).

There’s a lot more going on here: Kate manifests awful bloody stigmata, there’s much talk about making deals with Israel that will bring about a political apocalypse, and the two detectives investigating Sarah’s death (whom we barely see anyway) are each killed in ways that will just generate more questions. Not much of it makes sense, and most of it’s cheaply staged; apparently, in Los Angeles, any two points can be connected only by walking through a rundown warehouse district.

“Normally, stigmata smell like roses, but yours also carry a hint of cK One.”

As often happens in these Spawn of Satan movies, the Antichrist doesn’t really get to do anything earth-shatteringly evil before his reign of (cough) terror is ended. You’d think with all these years to plan, Lucifer would have had a better business plan for the apocalypse.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12 (not counting all the flashback kills from the first movie)
• breasts: 8
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Stephen Blackehart (Tom) played an uncredited Starfleet officer in the DS9 episode “What You Leave Behind”