The Underworld has been a busy place, once again, with excessive work commitments, another theatre adjudication to write and some unfortunate health issues (which, hopefully, will be on the road to resolution in the next 48 hours!) I tried to frontload the month with three posts in swift succession, hoping I could knock out another one soon after, but it just didn’t happen. So anyway, enough about me!
It’s October and time to scare up a post or two about something creepy and unsettling. (Don’t worry. This is not a post about Tom Cruise.) 
One of my favorite guilty pleasure horror movies is 1978’s Damien: Omen II. A sequel to the blockbuster hit The Omen (which starred Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as parents to a toddler who is The Antichrist), this movie takes place about seven years later and stars William Holden and an Underworld fave, Miss Lee Grant. The cuddly little monster from the first film has grown up a bit into early teenage Jonathan Scott-Taylor and resides with the late Peck’s brother Holden, Holden’s wife Grant and his son Lucas Donat. 
A prologue shows one of the first film’s stars (Leo McKern) frantically racing to see something called Yigael’s Wall at an archeological
dig, the wall supposedly depicting the face of The Antichrist at various developmental stages. When he and his associate witness the toddler Damien’s visage on the artifact, they are involved in a sand-riddled cave in before they can share what they know. The story then picks up at Holden’s estate, a beautifully appointed mansion that, in this film, is also a winter wonderland.
There for a visit is Holden’s Aunt Marion, the crotchety Sylvia Sidney, whose every raspy breath and craggy line reading is a treasure to behold.
She (wisely) doesn’t trust Scott-Taylor at all and dislikes the effect he has on her beloved nephew Donat. In a hilarious dinner table scene, she and Grant have an enmity that is palpable and she swiftly tosses Grant back into her place. Sadly, this gorgeous bit of rivalry is cut short when Sidney receives a visit in the night from an ominous black crow! Why, why, WHY did the writer have to remove the crusty and fretful Sidney from the storyline so soon?! I want more animosity and bickering from Grant and her… Note the way a shiny metal bird in the middle of the table forshadows the coming of the crow!
People can go on all they want to about the luxury and glamour of tumbled marble and slate flooring. In The Underworld, the lanai is paved with tiles bearing a pattern of the deceased, rigid corpse of Aunt Marion (Sidney), enjoying her eternal rest. This way, her scarlet lipstick etched face is never too far out of reach.
Scott-Taylor, though he has no clue at this stage that he is evil, has minions all over the place who are aiding him slyly in assuring that he will have the money and means
to rule America and then the world. At the military school that he and Donat attend, the commanding sergeant Lance Henrikson takes special interest in him and attempts to prep him for his sordid future. (This entire story thread has an unintentional -??- homoerotic bent to it. Because of the secrecy and menace of the situation, it always looks like Henrikson is one step away from trying to coerce Scott-Taylor into spending seven minutes in heaven with him!) 
At Holden’s multimillion-dollar chemical company, a lot of drama is taking place as well, with old guard senior manager Lew Ayres battling the ambitious
Robert Foxworth over the direction of things. In a memorable scene, Ayres pays the price for not going along with Foxworth’s plans when he falls beneath the ice of a partially frozen lake. His panic-stricken body is shown floating under the ice as skaters playing hockey frantically try to break it open and let him out. This is a gripping scene, made more meaningful by Holden’s panic and remorse. There is foreshadowing here, too, as Foxworth talks about putting his project "on ice" and Donat's birthday cake is in the form of a lake that must be cut into.
Then there’s Elizabeth Shephard, a crisp, British journalist (in the reddest coat ever to be placed on film!) who’s hot on the trail of Damien
and who wants to warn Holden about the type of boy he has in his household. She heads to the military school and, once she has seen Scott-Taylor’s face, freaks out, hurriedly driving back to town. Her car stops on a seemingly deserted road, but once she gets out, there’s our old friend the crow again! He does a Tippi Hedren on her, clawing at her hair, face and eyes as she flails about helplessly. After she’s been roundly assaulted by the evil beast (as harrowing Jerry Goldsmith music throbs away), she struggles to her feet only to find a massive truck hurtling towards her at full throttle!
Deaths continue to pile up. During a school tour of Holden’s company, two of the chemists are fatally injured in a fume-spewing explosion. 
All of the boys are hospitalized with minor injuries to their lungs, but Scott-Taylor is completely unaffected. When his blood work is scrutinized by a doctor (future Designing Women costar Meshach Taylor in his movie debut), evil forces dictate that the doctor not be allowed to disclose what he’s found, resulting in a particularly nasty and unforgettable demise for him as well.
Holden’s once-close friend, Nicholas Pryor, also finds out Damien’s secret and, in light of what has happened to so many others, begins to freak out, resorting to keeping religious iconography all over his room and person. Like others, he tries to warn Holden of the danger, but Holden is stubbornly reluctant to believe any of it (at least for the longest time.) It takes yet one more incident before he will agree to examine the evidence against his nephew.
In case you haven’t guessed it, very few of the primary actors in the movie wind up making it to the end credits! The film takes pleasure in dreaming up inventive ways to bump people off. Where The Omen was starkly serious and more threatening in tone, this sequel takes things a little further in the gore department and occasionally winds up being unintentionally funny thanks to its own squalor. It is undeniably entertaining, however.
One thing that helps add some dimension to the proceedings is the fact that Scott-Taylor has no idea at first that he is a child of Satan. He wants to be a normal boy. Eventually, he has no choice but to face what he is 
(a fact he discovers in a memorable bathroom mirror scene, followed by a desperate race through the woods in a fruitless effort to escape his fate.) The producers, smelling money in the prospect of yet another installment, adjusted the ending to make sure Damien could return and, in fact, he did in the form of Sam Neill three years later in The Final Conflict. (Oddly enough, even though only three years had passed in between films, Damien was now a grown man!) This film provides a hint to the sexual power Damien will eventually possess when he is swarmed by a bunch of teen girls in their best 70s 'dos at a graduation cotillion.
Scott-Taylor (a blond whose hair was dyed for this role) worked as an actor for about another decade until retiring from acting to become a lawyer. Can you imagine being in court with DAMIEN as your attorney?! He does an excellent job here, able to express the many facets of his conflicted character.
A more interesting backstory is Lucas Donat. He never made another film or even appeared on TV despite being the son of busy character actor Peter Donat and The Waltons’ Michael Learned! He went on to help found an advertising agency that is responsible for all those eharmony.com commercials. Even more fascinating is that through his wife, who he married in 1984, he has as his mother-in-law Helen Reddy!!!!!
Holden had been offered the leading role in The Omen, but turned it down. After that film’s stunning success, he didn’t hesitate when asked to be in the sequel. (The Omen cost $2.8 million to make and grossed over $60 million… This sequel cost $4 million and made over $26 million, not as successful, but certainly not a failure.) He was only about 60, but looked every inch of that and more thanks to some hard drinking and smoking. He had also picked up a liver ailment in New Guinea shortly before filming began. Sadly, he would die in an alcohol related fall in 1981.
Grant had been a big fan of the first film and was also eager to get in on the action. She was riding the wave of success that had come from her 1975 Supporting Actress Oscar for Shampoo and nomination the next year for Voyage of the Damned, winning top-billed roles in several projects. It was a small wave, however, and before long she was back to supporting parts. (To help indicate Holden’s physical decline, she was only nine years younger than him in real life, despite looking far younger.) As I’ve indicated in my previous tribute to her, she is marvelous in this movie and has a scream at the end that is wondrous. She essays her role here perfectly.
Foxworth (who was Elizabeth Montgomery’s live-in lover from 1973 until their marriage in 1993, two years before her premature death from cancer) was in Airport ’77 with Grant the prior year. He wasn’t able to become a leading man in the cinema, but made a strong impression on Falcon Crest for the first several years as Jane Wyman’s chief antagonist. Always an outspoken persona, he eventually quit the series when he disagreed with the direction of it. He has become chiefly involved in voice work for animation lately.
Lew Ayres, of course, is notable for having starred in the classic 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front and the later Johnny Belinda, for which he earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination. His pacifist beliefs raised some eyebrows during WWII, but he did serve in the Medical Corps (following a sticky situation in which he first was denied that right and briefly did Civilian Public Service work.) From 1934 to 1940, he was Mr. Ginger Rogers! This was his final feature film.
Miss Sydney had been a leading lady of the silver screen from the late 20s through the mid-40s, but, except for a few appearances in the 50s, was absent from the cinema until 1973 when she made a comeback in Joanne Woodward’s Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, scoring an Oscar nomination as her overbearing mother. This kicked off a wealth of amusing, usually cranky, parts for her right up until the end when she passed away at age 88 from throat cancer (twenty one years after this film!)
Elizabeth Shephard (billed elsewhere generally as Shepherd) had been working on British TV since the late 50s and went on to a long, prolific career in that same vein as well as in the movies. Horror fans know her as the leading lady in Vincent Price’s Hammer Film, Tomb of Ligeia, directed by Roger Corman. She also made a memorably mysterious appearance as Kevin Bacon’s mother in Criminal Law (the movie, not the TV show.)
This was an early role for lean, stern-looking Henrickson (who, as a runaway at age 12, didn’t learn to read until he was 30.) He’d had small roles in three major films before this (Dog Day Afternoon, Network and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and would go on to a very busy career as a character actor in such films as The Right Stuff, The Terminator, Aliens, Alien 3 and the Underworld classic Color of Night!
Note how foreign posters for the film (as always) demonstrate a far more vivid and garish approach than the more austere one that U.S. moviegoers saw. Spanish posters included shots of Holden and Grant within the wing of the crow while the American poster was far more plain. This one is completely different in concept and, with the scantily clad victim on the ground, almost suggests a whole other film altogether!
The plotline of the movie doesn’t really hold up to very close scrutiny, but it’s a pretty entertaining way to kill (and kill!) almost two hours. Cinema of the 70s was rife with paranoia
about satanic possession, devil worship, cults and so on. I always say I’m not afraid of Satan, but I am afraid of the fanatics who are devoted to him. (The same way any sort of freaked out cult or gang scares me.) People can get really warped sometimes if they become involved in something diabolical and have immersed themselves into all the related gobbledygook. The damage they do when under that influence is real, regardless of whether what they believe in is true or not!
As Halloween prepares to descend on us, be sure to have plenty of fun, but also take pains to make it safe! (i.e.- no ice skating on a partially frozen pond, no tours of a chemical plant, no nosiness about patients’ blood work and by all means, stay in the car if it breaks down and there’s a black crow nearby!)
What a multi-faceted career today’s subject has had. Born in New York City in 1927 (yes, ladies and gentlemen, she’s 82 years of age!), Lyova 
Rosenthal would grow up to become the wondrously intense, beguiling and edgy Miss Lee Grant!
Taking her stage name from the US Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S Grant, I guess it could have been worse. She could have dubbed herself Roberta Ulysses. Grant actually started her stage career at the tender age of 4 when she portrayed a child princess in a Metropolitan Opera production. Continuing to perfect her skills throughout her school years, she eventually won a scholarship to Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse, a place that also helped shape the acting talents of Robert Duvall, Steve McQueen, Joanne Woodward, Suzanne Pleshette and many others.
Grant had an early success in 1949 with the Broadway drama Detective Story, portraying a shoplifter who is held at the police station where myr
iad criminals and victims are intermingling, frightening her terribly. She won The Critic’s Circle Award for her performance and when the play was filmed in 1951, she, along with several other members of the cast, was brought on board to reprise the part. Capping off this great career start was an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Detective Story!
Despite this accolade, Grant was not yet a film commodity, nor did she reside in California. She kept busy back on the stage and in live television dramas broadcast from New York City. Before she could even hope to establish herself as an actress of the cinema, the McCarthy Witch Hunts, in which Communists were sought out in the film colony and anyone suspected of being one was blacklisted from working in the medium, began. Grant’s husband fell (as many folks did, whether it was justified or not) under suspicion and because she would not comply with the interrogators or name names, she was prevented from working in Hollywood movies. She claims to have a permanent mental block when it comes to remembering peoples’ names as a result of this tormenting experience.
She did land a job, thanks to friend Cornel Wilde, in the movie Storm Fear in 1955, b
ut otherwise, except for some TV and Broadway work, she lost out on a decade of promising employment as a big screen actress. In ’59, she appeared in Middle of the Night, an adaptation of a Paddy Chayefsky play, that starred Fredric March and Kim Novak. However, her primary work was in television until 1963.
’63 brought the film of The Balcony, a controvers
ial and much-examined Jean Genet play. The star of the film was Shelley Winters, who played a sexually ambiguous brothel madam and Grant played one of her gals. Peter Falk also starred and Leonard Nimoy made an appearance, giving the picture quite an eclectic cast.
Minor film work, along with various TV appearances, continued until 1965 when Grant was added to the cast of the hit prime time soap opera Peyton Place. For her work as Stella Chernak, she took home an Emmy Award.
1967 was quite a year for Lee Grant. First, she popped up in the Dick Van Dyke/Debbie Reynolds comedy Divorce American Style. Then she had a featured role in the striking Oscar-winner for Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night. In this fi
lm, she played the wife of a man who is slain in a small Georgia town and whose murder no one seems to be in a great hurry to solve.
Southern, sloth-like sheriff Rod Steiger is joined on the case by sharp-dressed, slick, city detective Sidney Poitier, stirring up significant racial tension in the process. Grant has a remarkable scene of despair when she is informed of her husband’s death. It’s not one of those hysterical, over-the-top moments, but rather a grippingly solemn pronouncement that the room is warm.
She also fights hard to keep Poitier engaged with
the case when practically everyone else wants him removed. It was a role that called for fragility blended with intense determination and she was nominated for a Golden Globe as a result, losing to Carol Channing, of all people, for Thoroughly Modern Millie, and not receiving an Oscar nod at all.
As if to counterbalance the extreme quality of Heat, she also had
a key supporting role in the camp screamfest Valley of the Dolls, as Miriam, the fretful sister of a male singer with a degenerative disorder. The same introspective passion she brought to her quality projects was evident here as well, but when the script and subject matter was this rotten, it could result in unintentional humor. It was a situation that would happen to Grant on more than one occasion.
All the while she was making these movies, she continued to appear as a guest on hit TV shows suc
h as The Big Valley and Ironside. In 1968, she played Telly Savalas’ wife in the Gina Lollobrigida comedy Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (which also starred Shelley Winters.) This tale, about an Italian woman who had relations with three different soldiers in a ten day span during WWII, resulting in a daughter, would later serve as inspiration for the smash ABBA stage musical (and later film) Mamma Mia!
Next, Grant took a supporting role in The Big Bounce, an adaptation of a novel by E
lmore Leonard, that starred two of her old Peyton Place costars, Ryan O’Neal and Leigh Taylor-Young (who were married at the time.) The film was remade in 2004 with Owen Wilson. She followed this up with a small role as astronaut Richard Crenna’s concerned wife Marooned.
Now established as a go-to girl f
or colorful supporting parts, she played Beau Bridges’ mother in The Landlord, another film that examined late 60s/early 70s race relations, though this time she was far less noble, enacting the role of a wealthy slumlord. This role earned her a second Oscar nomination. She also had a small part in Kirk Douglas’s There Was a Crooked Man, including a bed scene in which he was all business, to her mild dismay.
TV continued to provide her with meaty leading roles of a wide variety. In Night Slaves, she played the wife of James Franciscus and the couple is stuck in a town f
ull of unusual-acting residents. She won another Emmy for The Neon Ceiling, about a woman embarking on a spiritual quest with her daughter when she realizes how unfulfilling her life is. Then, in Ransom for a Dead Man, she got to take on Peter Falk’s Columbo in one of the earliest entries in that venerable series.
When Neil Simon turned his play Plaza Suite into a movie starring Walter Matthau, Grant was cast as one of three female costars. Originally meant fo
r two actors to do a tour de force in playing three roles apiece in three acts, the movie version did so only with Matthau and the results were middling. She did, at least, get to work in the most purely comic of the three vignettes as a harried mother of the bride.
Her role in the film Portnoy’s Complaint (a once-scandalous novel) was hacked down tremendously. She had filmed her character in a variety of ages and stages, but only her scenes as an old woman were left in the final cut. She continued to seek out interesting television roles until 1975 when she would be given Hollywood’s highest accolade.
Warren Beatty was working with Robert Towne on Shampoo, a movie concerning a 
highly successful, philandering hairdresser with many clients, several of whom get more than their hair done. The film’s landscape was crowded with actresses including Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn (and Carrie Fisher, in an early role!), but it was Grant who wrangled an Oscar win for her part as a sexually ravenous woman.
Hot on the heels of Shampoo, Grant went to work as the lead in a sitcom called Fay. The show featured a strong-minded, liberal character with a mother with whom
she engaged in loving combat. Written by Susan Harris and produced by Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas, it was cancelled after only eight episodes. Most notable, though, is the fact that the show was 5th in the ratings at the time! The series got so much negative mail that NBC felt compelled to pull it, despite its popularity! As just one sign of how prim TV was in 1975, the network actually bleeped the term “stretch marks.” This infuriated Grant who went on The Tonight Show and voiced her opinions quite clearly. If the names of the creators seem at all familiar, they should. They went on to create the vaguely similar The Golden Girls a decade later and offered Grant the lead in that. She (foolishly) declined, not wanting to play a grandmother (but, perhaps, also not wanting to head down the same road again as even that show occasionally faced censorship issues.)
We now enter my own personal favorite 
phase of Grant’s considerable career. In 1976, a truly astonishing cast was compiled for Voyage of the Damned, a gut-churning account of a German cruise liner filled with Jews that is sent to America ostensibly as a sign of goodwill, but actually as a political game, the Germans knowing full well that the US will not allow the passengers to disembark.
Based on a true (and shameful) story, the cast included Max Von Sydow, Faye Dunaway, Orson Welles, Malcolm McDowell, James Mason, Julie Harris and others. Duna
way (who everyone knows is practically my favorite actress) has a remarkable scene with Grant (who is easily in my top ten list of faves.) When it becomes apparent that the ship is going to return to Nazi Germany and result in death for many, if not all, of its inhabitants, dread sets in and some people can’t take it. Dunaway comes upon a distraught Grant who is snipping off her hair in an act of self-punishment. It’s an amazing moment and secured Grant yet another Oscar nomination.
For reflections on Grants’ wo
rk in Airport ’77, please click on the appropriate posting from the list at the right. Suffice it to say that her dazzlingly shrewish, mesmerizingly brazen work in that film changed my life for all time. Some people dream of one day playing Hamlet or Willy Loman. I fantasize about being allowed to portray the drunken, grasping bitch Karen Wallace of Airport ’77!
Next up was the horror flick Damian: Omen II, a sequel to the blockbuster The Omen, which, this time, had the anti-Christ aged to about 13. Having been orphaned in the first movie, the boy now lives with his uncle William Holden and Holden’s wife 
Grant. Several notable stars appear in the movie from Robert Foxworth to Lew Ayres to Miss Sylvia Sidney, who portrays a crusty, skeptical and confrontational old aunt. Am I the only one who finds this lobby card exceptionally amusing??
Anyway, Holden and Grant seem to find any excuse to disbelieve the suggestion that anything i
s unusual about Damian even though the body count seems to increase by the day! One memorable scene takes a page from Hitchcock’s The Birds and has a crow attacking a woman violently. Once again, Grant’s intensity serves her well by the film’s climax. No one, and I mean no one, could possibly scream the name “Daammmiaaaaan!!!” the way she did.
Irwin Allen somehow shanghaied her into a dull, useless part in his all-star bust The Swarm, after which she, again, turned back to TV and smaller films that could offer actin
g challenges (one of them being The Mafu Cage, the story of two strange sisters living with their dead father’s gorilla!) In 1981, she got to play the cougar-ish older woman who romances the divinely sexy Gregory Harrison in the TV movie For Ladies Only. Silly or not, his Zorro-inspired stripper persona pleasantly burned the retinas of many a viewer.
Then, in 1982, she filmed the third part of her Underworld Trifecta, the threesome of roles that earned her a place of honor here. She played t
he opinionated women’s movement speaker Deborah Ballin in the Canadian horror flick Visiting Hours.
A confident, forward-thinking character, a proponent of non-violence, she inadvertently sets off a deranged and emotionally abused man (Michael Ironside) who decides he must kill her. When his first attempt doesn’t do the trick, he follows her to the hospital where she’s being treated, hence the title. There are quite a few jolts along the way and it’s great to see Grant getting to emote her little heart out in panic and fear, even if it is in such a low-budget piece of junk
like this.
Her boyfriend in the film is played by none other than William Shatner, though there’s little chance for him or his hair to steal much of the ham spotlight from Miss Grant. She does, however, allow Miss Linda Purl to have quite a chunk of screen time as a caring nurse who also manages to tick off the loon.
Though Grant would continue to work in man
y TV projects (some of which included being Frances Farmer’s disturbed mother in Will There Really Be a Morning?, portraying Marilyn Klinghofer in the true story The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro and assaying the part of Roy Cohn’s mother in Citizen Cohn) and the odd film (such as Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life, It’s My Party, which reunited her with Gregory Harrison and Mullholland Dr.), eventually her acting assignments became less and less frequent.
Beginning in the mid-70s and continuing though 2005, she directed many short film
s, documentaries and an occasional feature. She also took the helm for 43 installments of the Lifetime TV biography series Intimate Portrait. Long-divorced from (the now-deceased) Arnold Manoff, their daughter Dinah became an actress as well and appeared in Grease, on the TV show Empty Nest (started by the same folks as The Golden Girls) and in many other things. Grant is now married (since 1962) to producer Joseph Feury and it’s quite hard to believe that she is now in her early 80s!Since she turned to more behind the came
ra work, I’ve missed seeing her in things, but I know when I come upon something with her in it, especially during the 70s, she’s going to find a way to keep it interesting.
The Underworld has been a busy place, once again, with excessive work commitments, another theatre adjudication to write and some unfortunate health issues (which, hopefully, will be on the road to resolution in the next 48 hours!) I tried to frontload the month with three posts in swift succession, hoping I could knock out another one soon after, but it just didn’t happen. So anyway, enough about me!
One of my favorite guilty pleasure horror movies is 1978’s Damien: Omen II. A sequel to the blockbuster hit The Omen (which starred Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as parents to a toddler who is The Antichrist), this movie takes place about seven years later and stars William Holden and an Underworld fave, Miss Lee Grant. The cuddly little monster from the first film has grown up a bit into early teenage Jonathan Scott-Taylor and resides with the late Peck’s brother Holden, Holden’s wife Grant and his son Lucas Donat. 
dig, the wall supposedly depicting the face of The Antichrist at various developmental stages. When he and his associate witness the toddler Damien’s visage on the artifact, they are involved in a sand-riddled cave in before they can share what they know. The story then picks up at Holden’s estate, a beautifully appointed mansion that, in this film, is also a winter wonderland.
She (wisely) doesn’t trust Scott-Taylor at all and dislikes the effect he has on her beloved nephew Donat. In a hilarious dinner table scene, she and Grant have an enmity that is palpable and she swiftly tosses Grant back into her place. Sadly, this gorgeous bit of rivalry is cut short when Sidney receives a visit in the night from an ominous black crow! Why, why, WHY did the writer have to remove the crusty and fretful Sidney from the storyline so soon?! I want more animosity and bickering from Grant and her… Note the way a shiny metal bird in the middle of the table forshadows the coming of the crow!
People can go on all they want to about the luxury and glamour of tumbled marble and slate flooring. In The Underworld, the lanai is paved with tiles bearing a pattern of the deceased, rigid corpse of Aunt Marion (Sidney), enjoying her eternal rest. This way, her scarlet lipstick etched face is never too far out of reach.
to rule America and then the world. At the military school that he and Donat attend, the commanding sergeant Lance Henrikson takes special interest in him and attempts to prep him for his sordid future. (This entire story thread has an unintentional -??- homoerotic bent to it. Because of the secrecy and menace of the situation, it always looks like Henrikson is one step away from trying to coerce Scott-Taylor into spending seven minutes in heaven with him!) 
Robert Foxworth over the direction of things. In a memorable scene, Ayres pays the price for not going along with Foxworth’s plans when he falls beneath the ice of a partially frozen lake. His panic-stricken body is shown floating under the ice as skaters playing hockey frantically try to break it open and let him out. This is a gripping scene, made more meaningful by Holden’s panic and remorse. There is foreshadowing here, too, as Foxworth talks about putting his project "on ice" and Donat's birthday cake is in the form of a lake that must be cut into.
and who wants to warn Holden about the type of boy he has in his household. She heads to the military school and, once she has seen Scott-Taylor’s face, freaks out, hurriedly driving back to town. Her car stops on a seemingly deserted road, but once she gets out, there’s our old friend the crow again! He does a Tippi Hedren on her, clawing at her hair, face and eyes as she flails about helplessly. After she’s been roundly assaulted by the evil beast (as harrowing Jerry Goldsmith music throbs away), she struggles to her feet only to find a massive truck hurtling towards her at full throttle!
All of the boys are hospitalized with minor injuries to their lungs, but Scott-Taylor is completely unaffected. When his blood work is scrutinized by a doctor (future Designing Women costar Meshach Taylor in his movie debut), evil forces dictate that the doctor not be allowed to disclose what he’s found, resulting in a particularly nasty and unforgettable demise for him as well.
Holden’s once-close friend, Nicholas Pryor, also finds out Damien’s secret and, in light of what has happened to so many others, begins to freak out, resorting to keeping religious iconography all over his room and person. Like others, he tries to warn Holden of the danger, but Holden is stubbornly reluctant to believe any of it (at least for the longest time.) It takes yet one more incident before he will agree to examine the evidence against his nephew.
In case you haven’t guessed it, very few of the primary actors in the movie wind up making it to the end credits! The film takes pleasure in dreaming up inventive ways to bump people off. Where The Omen was starkly serious and more threatening in tone, this sequel takes things a little further in the gore department and occasionally winds up being unintentionally funny thanks to its own squalor. It is undeniably entertaining, however.
(a fact he discovers in a memorable bathroom mirror scene, followed by a desperate race through the woods in a fruitless effort to escape his fate.) The producers, smelling money in the prospect of yet another installment, adjusted the ending to make sure Damien could return and, in fact, he did in the form of Sam Neill three years later in The Final Conflict. (Oddly enough, even though only three years had passed in between films, Damien was now a grown man!) This film provides a hint to the sexual power Damien will eventually possess when he is swarmed by a bunch of teen girls in their best 70s 'dos at a graduation cotillion.
Scott-Taylor (a blond whose hair was dyed for this role) worked as an actor for about another decade until retiring from acting to become a lawyer. Can you imagine being in court with DAMIEN as your attorney?! He does an excellent job here, able to express the many facets of his conflicted character.
A more interesting backstory is Lucas Donat. He never made another film or even appeared on TV despite being the son of busy character actor Peter Donat and The Waltons’ Michael Learned! He went on to help found an advertising agency that is responsible for all those eharmony.com commercials. Even more fascinating is that through his wife, who he married in 1984, he has as his mother-in-law Helen Reddy!!!!!
Holden had been offered the leading role in The Omen, but turned it down. After that film’s stunning success, he didn’t hesitate when asked to be in the sequel. (The Omen cost $2.8 million to make and grossed over $60 million… This sequel cost $4 million and made over $26 million, not as successful, but certainly not a failure.) He was only about 60, but looked every inch of that and more thanks to some hard drinking and smoking. He had also picked up a liver ailment in New Guinea shortly before filming began. Sadly, he would die in an alcohol related fall in 1981.
Grant had been a big fan of the first film and was also eager to get in on the action. She was riding the wave of success that had come from her 1975 Supporting Actress Oscar for Shampoo and nomination the next year for Voyage of the Damned, winning top-billed roles in several projects. It was a small wave, however, and before long she was back to supporting parts. (To help indicate Holden’s physical decline, she was only nine years younger than him in real life, despite looking far younger.) As I’ve indicated in my previous tribute to her, she is marvelous in this movie and has a scream at the end that is wondrous. She essays her role here perfectly.
Foxworth (who was Elizabeth Montgomery’s live-in lover from 1973 until their marriage in 1993, two years before her premature death from cancer) was in Airport ’77 with Grant the prior year. He wasn’t able to become a leading man in the cinema, but made a strong impression on Falcon Crest for the first several years as Jane Wyman’s chief antagonist. Always an outspoken persona, he eventually quit the series when he disagreed with the direction of it. He has become chiefly involved in voice work for animation lately.
Lew Ayres, of course, is notable for having starred in the classic 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front and the later Johnny Belinda, for which he earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination. His pacifist beliefs raised some eyebrows during WWII, but he did serve in the Medical Corps (following a sticky situation in which he first was denied that right and briefly did Civilian Public Service work.) From 1934 to 1940, he was Mr. Ginger Rogers! This was his final feature film.
Miss Sydney had been a leading lady of the silver screen from the late 20s through the mid-40s, but, except for a few appearances in the 50s, was absent from the cinema until 1973 when she made a comeback in Joanne Woodward’s Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, scoring an Oscar nomination as her overbearing mother. This kicked off a wealth of amusing, usually cranky, parts for her right up until the end when she passed away at age 88 from throat cancer (twenty one years after this film!)
Elizabeth Shephard (billed elsewhere generally as Shepherd) had been working on British TV since the late 50s and went on to a long, prolific career in that same vein as well as in the movies. Horror fans know her as the leading lady in Vincent Price’s Hammer Film, Tomb of Ligeia, directed by Roger Corman. She also made a memorably mysterious appearance as Kevin Bacon’s mother in Criminal Law (the movie, not the TV show.)
This was an early role for lean, stern-looking Henrickson (who, as a runaway at age 12, didn’t learn to read until he was 30.) He’d had small roles in three major films before this (Dog Day Afternoon, Network and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and would go on to a very busy career as a character actor in such films as The Right Stuff, The Terminator, Aliens, Alien 3 and the Underworld classic Color of Night!
Note how foreign posters for the film (as always) demonstrate a far more vivid and garish approach than the more austere one that U.S. moviegoers saw. Spanish posters included shots of Holden and Grant within the wing of the crow while the American poster was far more plain. This one is completely different in concept and, with the scantily clad victim on the ground, almost suggests a whole other film altogether!
about satanic possession, devil worship, cults and so on. I always say I’m not afraid of Satan, but I am afraid of the fanatics who are devoted to him. (The same way any sort of freaked out cult or gang scares me.) People can get really warped sometimes if they become involved in something diabolical and have immersed themselves into all the related gobbledygook. The damage they do when under that influence is real, regardless of whether what they believe in is true or not!
