Omen IV: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		2.5

Omen IV: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson November 4, 2019

Omen IV: The Awakening (1991) is being released as part of Scream Factory's five-disc box set, The Omen Collection: Deluxe Edition.

After The Final Conflict's paltry performance at the domestic box office, any talk of another Omen sequel languished for many years until a network executive from Rupert Murdoch's then-fledgling 20th Century Fox Television empire decided to dust off The Omen property and reconfigure it as a made-for-TV movie. Fox's moguls basically wanted to remake Richard Donnor's 1976 classic for the '90s but producer Harvey Bernhard and screenwriter Brian Taggert had some other ideas. Omen IV: The Awakening does rehash the plot of the original but a conscious decision was made to do a female offspring of Damien this time. Karen and Gene York (Faye Grant and Mich­ael Woods) can't conceive a child so they go to a Catholic orphanage and adopt baby Delia. The Yorks are a well-off family based in an upper-class suburb somewhere in Virginia. With echoes of Robert Thorn, Gene is a successful politician running for the state's Senate seat. Karen and Gene are a happily married couple but during a gala at their home fêting their adopted daughter, Delia scratches the side of her mother's neck and left cheek, causing her to bleed. As Delia grows a little older and gets into an elementary school, she's a victim of the school's bully but retaliates with cruel acts of her own. Then a freak accident besets the bully's father. Karen goes to her local priest seeking guidance. He doesn't have all the answers so she hires a private detective (Michael Lerner) to investigate the child's history and her biological parents. His search leads him to an ex-nun whose now a spiritualist and once had a bad premonition about Delia. Things get more bizarre and worse for Karen's plight.

The Awakening initially aired in the US on Monday, May 20, 1991 as part of “Fox Night at the Movies." Watching the first half in particular, I could tell that this was fashioned as a telefilm. There's a big drop-off in the acting compared to the other movies. Asia Vieira doesn't make Delia as complex, well-rounded, and three-dimensional as Jonathan Scott-Taylor's does young teen Damien. Vieira's performance is predictable. I knew she was the "bad girl" from her first moment on screen. She always acts like a malcontent. Scott-Taylor certainly doesn't always act as if he's the Anti-Christ. He projects convincingly that he's a friendly cousin to Mark and a loving son to Richard Thorn. Vieira's characterization isn't entirely the fault of Brian Taggert's because his often witty script is one of the best parts of The Awakening. The film gets better when the Yorks hire a new nanny (the anti-Mrs. Baylock) who has a Native American spiritualist boyfriend and brings Vieira to a psychic fair. Omen IV has its share of ludicrous moments and that makes it inconsistent. It reprises several of the story events of the original but there's one rule of David Seltzer's (which I won't reveal to those who haven't seen it) that Taggert completely ignores and the film would have been all the better had it at least tried it. As a whole, The Awakening is very flawed but fun to see in a serio-comic sense if you're ultra-familiar with the others in the series.

Omen IV: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Omen IV: The Awakening makes its global debut on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-50. The $4.3 million production was originally broadcast in the TV standard of 1.33:1 and disappointingly, Scream doesn't include a full-frame version. We do get the originally composed 1.85:1 that was presumably projected in cinemas throughout Australia, France, Germany, the UK, and a few other countries. The print is in pretty decent shape and Scream has done a commendable job of restoring it in 2K. The autumnal colors look a bit dull, though. DNR has been applied and one can detect this in the extreme close-ups and regular close-ups. See Screenshot #s 8-12 and especially #10. Conversely, for special shots of the hissing snake (#15), one will spot both dirt and textured grain. I only noticed some age-related print artifacts primarily during the first half hour. My video score is 3.75. Scream has encoded the feature presentation at a mean video bitrate of 25992 kbps.

The 97-minute film has twelve chapter selections.

Omen IV: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Scream supplies a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo (1633 kbps, 24-bit) from the original stereo mix. This is a disappointing track as I frequently found myself turning the volume way up to hear all the words. This could be a byproduct of the recording at the time but the pitch seems too low. Composer Jonathan Sheffer (Bloodhounds of Broadway) employs a contrapuntal approach to his light and bouncy score. The blithe woodwinds go against the gravity of the onscreen images. Sheffer does a better job of incorporating Jerry Goldsmith's "Ave Satani" into several scenes as well as The Hunt from The Final Conflict. The amplitude from the musical material is noticeably more impressive on the speakers than the dialogue.

Optional English subtitles accompany the main feature.

Omen IV: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• NEW The Book of Evil – An Interview with Screenwriter Brian Taggert (18:11, 1080p) - the recently departed screenwriter rates the Omen films individually and discusses how he got the writing gig to pen The Awakening. He speaks glowingly of working with producer Harvey Bernhard and how Hollywood as an industry has changed since he worked in the '80s and '90s. He addresses whether or not he believed in the Devil and how he and Taggert decided on a female evil doer for the fourth film. Taggert explains how he conceptualized certain scenes for Omen IV and how they turned out on screen. In English, not subtitled.

• The Omen Legacy – A Documentary on THE OMEN films (101:39, upconverted to 1080i) - this feature-length documentary on the Omen franchise was originally released on DVD in 2003 by Image Entertainment, licensed by Fox for its Collector's Edition DVD of The Omen (1976) three years later, and shortly thereafter ported over for the single and box set Blu-ray editions. The program first aired on AMC in 2001 and covers all four films with excerpted clips and talking heads from the filmmakers, actors, and religious experts. Not surprisingly, The Awakening is given the least amount of coverage with a mere twelve minutes. Jack Palance narrates. This extra uses the MPEG-2 encode. In English, not subtitled.

• Theatrical Trailer (1:19, upconverted to 1080p) - a pan-and-scan transfer of Fox's official trailer that's of average quality. It's also MPEG-2.

• Still Gallery (2:14, 1080p) - this slide show consists of twenty-nine stills. The first half-dozen images contain black-and-white glossy photos from Fox's official press kit; the final twenty-three are a mixture of publicity pictures, lobby cards, and one US poster from the American, French, and German ad campaigns (apparently, Fox also handled distribution sales overseas, too.) The latter bunch are all displayed in color.

Omen IV: The Awakening Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

When I first learned about Omen IV: The Awakening after first seeing The Final Conflict, I was expecting a wretched third sequel so I was pleasantly surprised that it's a lot better than I first expected. Brian Taggert's screenplay is sometimes clever but other times too clever for its own good, particularly when it tries so hard to imitate the original it becomes silly. The cast is not up to par with the preceding films' ensembles but I thought the performances improved during the second half. Scream Factory's transfer is relatively clean but integrates noise reduction for the closer shots. The uncompressed stereo is underwhelming. I would have liked a commentary track by either Scott Michael Bosco (whose a no-show) or TV movie historian Amanda Reyes. The Awakening is WORTH SEEING but you'll likely want to buy this box set mainly for The Omen's (1976) 4K scan and the new bonus materials on the first three films' discs. Still, it's good to finally have it in high-def.