But I thought I’d men­tion my first end-of-semester exam just hap­pens to fall on 6/6/06. At 16:00. Co-incidence? I think not! Heh. Let The Omen try and monop­o­lise dates all it wants… even uni­ver­sity fac­ul­ties have a strange sense of sym­bolic appro­pri­ate­ness in sched­ul­ing events. (Just for the record I don’t place much impor­tance on the date. Just another day. It seems espe­cially bizarre once you expand the date fully… 6/6/2006… what’s the “2000” got to do with anything?)

Whilst crit­i­ciz­ing the movie, it’s worth remark­ing that the only trailer I’ve seen for it was the most phe­nom­e­nally under­whelm­ing film trailer I’ve ever seen. Like, I actu­ally had no response to it. Nor­mally at least I’d go “wow that looks like a crap movie” to a bad trailer… this didn’t even evoke that much emo­tion. The impact of the trailer on me was lit­er­ally zero. Hav­ing said that, being a fan of the genre for what­ever rea­son (trashy, sus­pens­ful, poten­tially cool spe­cial effects, what­ever) and watch­ing too many films any­way (except for the, err, allegedly formative/canonical works of a medium that cer­tain peo­ple have been try­ing to make me watch for­ever), I may well end up see­ing it. The pos­si­bil­ity is sig­nif­i­cantly lower than if the trailer hadn’t been utter crap. Even if my response is “wow that looks like a crap movie”, I might feel like watch­ing a crap/trashy movie and actively choose to see it once in a cinema-context. That’s hap­pened plenty in the past, with vary­ing con­se­quences in terms of enjoy­ment of film.

Then again, maybe the film is actu­ally just that bor­ing. A shot of some kid on a swing was the best they’ve got. It wasn’t even an under­stated trailer, because the clichéd VO guy was out in full force if I recall cor­rectly. Nope, must just be a crap movie.