• Directed by Jack Perez
• Written by Benjamin Henry and Austin Laurel
• Starring
  • Adam Vincent
  • Boo Boo Stewart
  • Sarah Lieving
  • Rodney Bowman
  • Nora Jesse
• Produced by David Michael Latt and Sherri Strain

I absolutely adore the marketing chutzpah of The Asylum. In case you don’t know them by name, The Asylum is the production company reponsible for most of those blatant ripoff D2DVD features, the ones that usually hit the new release shelves the same week that a big-budget feature with an uncannily similar name reaches theaters. When Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds hit the big screen, The Asylum had their own version of the novel out. The remake of When a Stranger Calls inspired When a Killer Calls. The remake of The Hills Have Eyes spawned Hillside Cannibals. The second Pirates of the Caribbean movie was met with Pirates of Treasure Island, and Peter Jackson’s King Kong was countered with a version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World titled King of the Lost World. Eager moviegoers waiting to see the studio adaptation of The Da Vinci Code could enjoy themselves in the meantime with The Da Vinci Treasure, and Will Smith’s I Am Legend was beaten to release by I Am Omega by several weeks. The supreme accomplishment, in my eyes, was their answer to Snakes on a Plane, called (you guessed it) Snakes on a Train, though you may prefer the titular brilliance of their response to the big-budget Transformers, entitled Transmorphers.

I appreciate the bald manner of hucksterism in this production strategy. Everyone in Tinseltown wants to be first to be second, and The Asylum has made a science out of piggybacking on the overblown marketing budgets of Hollywood bloat. And you’ll note that the majority of the theatrical features honored by imitation are themselves remakes, sequels, or adaptations from other media, so it’s not as if original creative accomplishment was being bastardized by direct-to-DVD hangers-on. The Asylum is a wily vulture who snaps up some choice scraps in between the ravenous studio hyenas at the corpse of whatever original work they’re devouring. And to The Asylum’s credit, relatively few of their “rip-off” movies actually rip off the big-budget feature to any great degree; as long as the title is reminiscent of the bigger movie, and the concept lends itself to a similar DVD box design, the screenplays can often go off in entirely different directions.

One of these people works in front of the camera; one works behind it. Guess which is which.

Of course, in order to have their DVDs in stores by the time the big-budget movie reaches theaters, the good folks at The Asylum have to gamble on the hits, and sometimes they guess wrong. Snakes on a Plane and When a Stranger Calls did mediocre box-office business. The lukewarm response to the Nicole Kidman vehicle The Invasion probably depressed renter reaction for The Asylum’s Invasion of the Pod People. Which brings us to a discussion of our current feature, 666: The Child, which is naturally an echo of the big-budget remain of The Omen (2006), which performed adequately but not spectacularly at the box office, and got a largely lukewarm critical response. (The remake hews fairly close to the original, which I thought was itself a silly movie, designed itself to capitalize on the aftermath of The Exorcist (1973), so we’re already several degrees of separation from original thought.) 666: The Child also follows fairly closely the outlines of the Omen movies (drawing from the first two, really), but I think that’s forgivable; really, don’t we all know the twist when we start the movie? It’s an entire feature about people discovering this horrible secret that we’ve known since we first saw the movie poster or DVD cover, namely that the child in question is indeed the Antichrist. That was a flaw in the Omen movies — waiting two-thirds of the movie for the characters to catch up to what the audience already knows — so it would be unfair to lay the charge particularly at the feet of this movie.

We start things off here with a bang — or rather, a boom, as an airliner crashes in Glendale. Local news anchor Erika Lawson (Sarah Lieving) is in the studio, and her husband, cameraman Scott (Adam Vincent), is reporting from the ground, when they see a single figure crawl from the wreckage: Donald (Boo Boo Stewart), who is — let’s just get the suspense out of the way, shall we? — the nine-year-old Antichrist himself. If the box cover didn’t clue you in, then there’s the moment when he looks through a wall where a philandering nurse and doctor are getting sweaty in a supply closet and causes a ceiling pipe to crush them both. Although it seems to me that the devil should be encouraging that kind of casual sinning and dereliction of duty.

“Contact! My contact!”

Erika and Scott feel particularly drawn to this poor little kid, especially when they discover that he’s an orphan (I mean, he was even before he boarded the plane). They’ve been unlucky having kids on their own, so they put their names in to adopt the Spawn of Satan; and with the help of Erika’s sister Mary Lou (Kim Little), a TV cook and fashion celebrity who makes Martha Stewart look like Roseanne Barr, they get bumped to the top of the list. I’m not too familiar with adoption processes, but I find it hard to believe that a young couple with no childrearing experience would simply be “handed the keys” to an orphan without any sort of trial period — indeed, for the adoption to be finalized before the child even meets them. Call me old-fashioned, I guess.

Being the busy professional couple that they are (even though Scott’s supposed to be recuperating after taking some shrapnel in his leg during his last assignment in a war zone), they need child care, and initially go with Scott’s father Jake (Robert D. McEwen), a retired ex-Marine who’s just moved into their guesthouse. That goes awry the first day, when all-American Jake tries to teach his new grandson how to catch a fly ball. One bad catch in the mouth, and the two of them end up at the dentist’s office… where apparently the Antichrist doesn’t appreciate brusque and false-faced dentists. The drill goes wild, and suddenly two dental professionals lie dead. (This, I assume, is what happens when a dentist turns on the drill and aims it menacingly at the Son of Satan’s mouth before he even examines the injuries. As it later turns out, Donald had no problem except for a cut gumline.)

America’s pastime… from hell!!!

And then apparently Donald holds a grudge, because that night, the ceiling fan in Jake’s bedroom falls and slices him in all the wrong places. That leaves Scott kind of traumatized, especially because he installed the ceiling fan himself. And Erika isn’t much help, because an occasion to meet-and-greet some network types in New York comes her way, and grieving be damned — there’s a career on the line here. So she leaves Scott and his camera assistant Terry with Donald, to fend for themselves with self-recriminations, a crazy homeless nun (Lucy Doty) who breaks into the house and starts babbling apocalyptically, and the eventual nanny.

Ah, the nanny. As soon as she shows up and we see that she’s got the same pseudo-oriental features as Donald himself, we just know that Lucy (Nora Jesse) is more than just a child development professional; she’s a minion and servant of the Dark One. Just in case that isn’t dead obvious, she gives her last name as “Fir.” Lucy Fir. Har de har har. And she starts Donald on his path to diabolical greatness, by…

Hmm. That’s the problem. Just as in the original Omen, Donald doesn’t really have a great satanic mission. Mostly he kills people who annoy him. I’ll grant you that he’s got the right look, simultaneously cute and brooding to the point that those of us with daughters would fear for them on a date with him a few years. But he’s got no personality to speak of; mostly he just bides his time while Scott starts putting the deranged nun together with the orphanage that burned down, leaving Donald almost as the only survivor. Maybe he’s just unsettled because of all the death and because of Erika pursuing her career with an ambition he hadn’t seen before, but he starts investigating Donald’s past and comes up with Father O’Herlihy (Allen Duncan), the only other survivor of the fire, now covered with burn scars and living in hospice care. (You want a direct ripoff from the original Omen? O’Herlihy’s got his room papered in overlapping pictures of Jesus.)

Lucy the loosie. (I slay me!)

As the movie goes on, it gets stupider, or maybe the stupidity present from the beginning becomes more apparent… mostly in the form of questions which the story raises but hasn’t the wherewithal to answer. One of the biggest such is the issue of Donald’s drawings; he’s quite the little artist, and Scott and Erika ooh and ahh over his sketchpad, but later Tony discovers his “secret” cache of artwork, hidden behind a map on the wall where they can randomly fall out to influence the plot. (Donald has the power to reach out and captivate the hearts of two people whose adoptive parenting will further his purposes, but he can’t find a better hiding place?) Problem is, these drawings are done in a very different and far less skilled style than the innocuous sketches we saw earlier; a further problem is that these show the gory deaths of people which we might (I think) be supposed to identify as the characters in the movie (like I said, the art’s quite primitive) — but why would the Crown Prince of Sin label drawings with invective labels like “Whore”? Ol’ Scratch usually approves of licentiousness instead of punishing it with dismemberment. (At least on this side of death.)

Really, despite the setup that Donald has gotten himself into, he really has nothing to bide his time until his sloppy clues lead Scott to the inescapable conclusion. We fill the time with more random (and bloodspattered) deaths, and there’s a whole subplot about Lucy trying to seduce Scott while Erika is away, but even that never comes to anything; Scott is neither left beholden to Lucy nor compromised in Erika’s eyes by whatever happens. It’s simply Obligatory Temptation, thrown in because that’s what you do in a “child of Satan” movie.

Woodworking: You’re doing it wrong.

Again, I can’t blame this movie too much with all of this, except for being a willful attempt to cash in on bigger movies which themselves have most of the same flaws, or at least flaws in a similar vein. People keep making movies about an up-and-coming Antichrist, but then they can’t seem to think of what the Son of Beelzebub should do to plausibly fill 90 minutes. (Or slightly less.)

Plot problems aside, the production is cheap but professional; Sarah Lieving as Erika doesn’t quite have the emotional range of your standard local newsanchor (yes, that IS supposed to be a bigger dig on second glance), but Scott does quite well, as long as you can stomach a Gen-Xer who makes enough for a spacious house with pool and guesthouse but still dresses like a homeless guy. And in between the rote borrowing from previous movies in the same vein, there are some knowing nods included strictly for wit’s sake, such as Jake’s plan to take Donald to the zoo until Scott and Erika nix the idea.

Really, how well you enjoy this movie is forecast by how well you enjoy the several Omen iterations and hangers-on. If you swallow the camel of the big-budget versions, I can’t really see you straining too hard at the gnat here.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 10 (plus a planeload)
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • D.C. Douglas (Dr. Loring, the dentist) was “Zepht” in the Enterprise episode “The Breach”