“The Omen” cast a long shadow, and this well-made but somewhat derivative tale sits squarely enough within it that some of the scares are unfortunately predictable. Holly Palance cheerily throwing herself off the roof in 1976 was genuinely chilling; when the overly gregarious neighbore for some reason is oddly assertive about wanting to clear the house’s walk in this movie and the camera lingers a little too long on the blower’s spinning blades, you already know what he’s going to do with a big smile on his face.
The plot is actually somewhat different than the sources a lot of the tropes come from—an elderly grieving Satanist couple kidnaps a pregnant woman to sacrifice her in order to bring their grandson back from the dead.
On the upside, it’s pretty well-made and acted—it’s Canadian, after all—and has Julian Richings, the creepy skinny actor who played the devil IIRC in “Supernatural” and gets deservedly cast as demons and supernatural creepy guys in a lot of things, is the lead as the husband of the older couple. And it has a couple of cute points… when one of the predictable suicides keeps randomy reappearing to reenact her sudden death by gunshot to her own head, at first it scares the bejesus out of everybody, but by the end, she does it and only startles one guy, leading one of the other actors to casually say to him, “Yeah, she’s been doing that all night.” So, the Canadian does poke through occasionally.
Overall, wouldn’t go out of my way to see it but if you have a tolerance for derivative plot points it’s not bad.