turd-o-meter

For this straight-to-video coat-tail rider for the remake of The Omen (2006), someone noticed the cool date of 06/06/06 & decided to dash together 666: The Child (2006) & promote the release date as Satan's birthday.

Flight number 666 crashes in the mountains with one survivor, a little boy of unknown origin. The kid is played by the rather exotic very attractive mixed-race child star with the wacky name Boo Boo Stewart. The performance is not as interesting as the name.

Local woman newscaster (Sarah Lieving) & her photographer husband (Adam Vincent) are drawn to the child, named Donald rather than Damien, & they're almost crazilly eager to adopt him.

Meanwhile at the hospital in the middle of the night, Donald's sleep is interrupted by a nurse & orderly he can hear having sex in the next room. So he causes a weird "accident" to punish them for noisy sex.

He next kills the dentist & dental hygienist for scaring him. Both of these minor gore sequences are fabulously stupid.

Next up is to get rid of grampa using the mighty power of a ceiling fan. A spooky nun gets it with a car. A guy investigating the kid is attacked by a lawnmower & electrical tools. Silly, silly, silly.

Partly a spoof of The Omen & the many other films about evil little boys, it's unfortunately never at any time funny, unless you think such things as citing the number 6 several times is just oh so witty. Two twelve year olds stoked up on Mountain Dew could've written a better script in one or two days.

Pretending to be spoofy seems merely the fall-back position when exploitation filmmakers dash off some product exactly like several others, but get everything wrong. Director Jack Perez quite correctly didn't even want his name on it, adopting the pseudonym Jake Jackson for his screen credit.

When the sole purpose of a film is blood & guts it's already so low down it seems impossible not to succeed at its minimal purpose. But this one fails even at the level of simple gore.



Sequels have a tendency to be worse than the originals. Where 666: The Child was concerned, the bar was not set high. 666: The Beast (2007) even so manages to be an even bigger turd.

It carries through the imitation of The Omen for a variant of The Omen 3: The Final Conflict (1978), which had the demon-spawn Damien beginning his world conquest with corporate success. This time it's Donald (Chad Mathews) entering the corporate world, though never is it particularly evident what makes him the anti-christ beyond some people thinking so.

Terrible-terrible acting makes the absurdly bad script even worse. We last knew Donald as an evil self-serving kid, but as our story opens, he is not such a bad guy really. Not at first at any rate.

He's married to saintly Kate (Makinna Ridgway), who has the "mark of the not the beast" on her, a tiny cross. She is pregnant, we're later asked to believe, with the True Messiah.

Chances are it's not her husband Donald's kid, but a virgin conception, but why the modern-day Virgin Mary would be married to the anti-christ instead of a modern-day Joseph, the script had no sense that this might even be worthy of speculation, let alone explanation.

At the corporation where Donald works, he's skyrocked to the position of vice-president.

He's being groomed by the company president Ashmed (Amol Shah) who knows Donald is the antichrist. Donald himself doesn't know this & has been "corrupted" by good, so has to be awakened to his destiny.

Not that he's himself "good" exactly, but he hasn't been spending his life (in the wake of killing his parents as a child) doing further evil. Failure to do evil, from the devilly point of view, is because the world took the dark edge off of him, in much the same way as an angel in the material world might have the brightness smudged.

If the film had really developed this apparent theme in any manner beyond talking-heads saying it's so, it might've been a pretty cool bad film.

So the company president sets out to corrupt Donald until he again learns to be a murderer & shoves his rival down a flight of stairs. Simultaneously his Lilith-like assistant Sydonai (Alma Saraci, probably the winner for worst of a bad lot of actors pretending to act ) corrupts him to cheat on Kate.

There are a couple kills along the way, but they amount to easy stabbings or the rival pushed down a staircase. The lord of darkness killing someone by the same means my loony grandma might've done it doesn't spark awe.

There's almost no on-screen blood at all, & when Donald stabs the Ashmed (seemingly in the nuts) it happens below the frame of the screen.

So in terms of brutality or gore, this film has none of that, apart form Kate's "stigmata" sequence when she's all alone with blood spewing from her wrists & feet. That scene was the only good one. The "almost worked" scene was the opening "teaser" which provides a small whiff of gore when Kate's twin sister is shown crucified, though most of that event happened off-screen too.

So it's not for the gore; it's certainly nor for the idiotic story; & unlike 666: The Child, there's no pretense that the reason it's so bad is because it's a parody. It's just a straightforward bad version of The Final Conflict which was already pretty bad.

The primary symbol of Donald's corruption is lusting for babes other than Kate. The worst evil the screenwriter/director could think of was faux-lesbian s/m on a rooftop, which Donald gets to watch.

When Donald finally does go all evil, he just stands on the roof of the place he works, with a bunch of satan worshippers we never saw before, looking pleased to be worshipped, doing nothing that might prove anyone might be convinced he's the devil. He never does anything supernaturally evil. Screwing & killing is the worst of it.

Meanwhile in the parallel story, Kate is being protected (incompetently) by an agent of the Vatican, the absurdly named Father Deacon Cain (Collin Brock).

Fatjer Cain provides the bored viewer with a couple didactic monologues but never actually does anything.

When the final showdown arrives, it's Kate with the Messiah about to be born versus Evil Donald who needs to kill his wife & the infant. A secret order of seven priests tries to protect her, all but Father Deacon Cain killed without bleeding much.

After the mild killing, with a "twist" in the end that isn't much of a twist at all. I should probably just tell you what happens so you don't have to suffer the the torture of sitting through it yourself. But with apologies, there'll be no spoiler this time.

No gore, some ineffective action, Donald's defeat, & then the child is born in the cathedral. What that's supposed to lead to is anyone's guess. The priest tells Kate to have faith, it'll mean something someday. But I don't think so.

The only thing good that can be said of the ending is at least it's over & the dvd can be tossed in the "discard" bin, as I wouldn't keep this one around to impose it on friends ever.



Not really part of the "666" series, but predating those films, 666: The Demon Child (2004) was seemingly re-released in a new box to ride of the coattails of those terrible films, which are nevertheless better than this one.

It's kind of a variant on the vastly to be preferred B-film It's Alive (1974), except the semi-remake doesn't even begin to rise to B level.

It was produced not only as direct-to-video but seemingly direct-to-cut-out-bin in the $1 and $3 remainder piles, & I do mean piles. If you pay a dollar for it, you've been robbed.

Seemingly made merely to test just how awful a film can be & still have idiots like me watch it, the demon-child as portrayed on the newest dvd box does not appear in the film; so unfortunately the box is the best part of the experience.

The only thing creepy about the baby is its sound effect. It won't stop crying; it'd make the most professional nanny smother it.

It is otherwise just no big deal. When it bites, the "actors" if you can call them actors seem to be wrestling with a rubber doll purchased at Toys R Us, with jelly smeared on it for the money shots.

It's padded out with scenes of walking & lots of talking heads, & when it's time for a moment of screaming action, there's that Toys R Us doll given a good shaking in front of the camera. It's like all the padding that can be put into a no-budget film, but with no actual film.

There's no real plot but there's lots more demon eggs out there somewhere in who-knows-which desert cave. The eggs must be found & destroyed, or the world will come to an end.

The intimations that these demons were once worshipped by Native Americans & are very ancient, & the world ain't ended yet, sort of takes the wind out of the prediction.

Everyone involved in this film should be roundly embarrassed. Nor should any of them ever again be permitted to write, direct, produce, or be in the cast of any other film ever again.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl