Movies I'm Not Watching

So I’m not really watching The Omen, but I can’t deny that, as I sit here, layered in blankets and sunken into the extra-wide cushions on my couch like a giant moss-covered boulder pushed into soft earth, The Omen, yes, that one with Liv Schrieber and Julia Stiles that was so almost-cleverly released on June 6, 2006, otherwise known as 6-6-6, is on. It’s not that I want to watch it, really, it’s just that when there’s a choice between bad shows, you tend to choose the one that’s in HD, as if somehow 1920 interlaced pixels of crap are better than 720. That’s the theory I’m working on anyway.

But now that I’m here I have a couple of questions. First, Damien? What self respecting snooty rich parent—even the type played by Liv Schrieber and (ha!) Julia Stiles—names their kid Damien? Haven’t these people ever seen a horror movie? Don’t they know they’re in one, fercryinoutloud, as if they couldn’t tell from all the spooky atmospherics and eerie strips of light and dank rooms and talk of god and demons and such. New rule: When David Thewlis is running around with a dog-eared, yellow highlighted Bible giving your lectures on Jewish prophesy, watch out! By the time the disfigured, one-eyed priest dramatically flips off his hood, you oughta have gotten the hint. I mean, it’s not like that sort of thing just happens.

Not to Julia Stiles, anyway.

And, fine, you name your kid Damien, tempt the horror movie gods, and that’s that. Rebellion! Fate! Bad screenwriting! Whatever. But do you have to give him such a creepy haircut, too? I mean, these are supposed to be moneyed twits with taste and such, the sort of folk who wear cocktail dresses and cuff-links to a Saturday in the park, right? And yet they give a fugly bowl haircut that would be laughed out of most trailer parks.

Honestly, there are some things I’ll just never understand.