‘I used to think the world would change. But it hasn’t…’
Released at the height of the slasher boom at the end of the ’80s, Carl Schultz’s The Seventh Sigh, an occult religious horror thriller, perhaps unsurprisingly tanked at the box office, was critically mauled and then sank without a trace. All cinema, indeed, all art in any form, is just people nicking ideas from their heroes and reframing it through their own personal experience. It is a fine line between homage and imitation, however, and The Seventh Sigh never threatens to be anything other than a pale imitation of The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby…
Abby (Demi Moore) and Russell Quinn (Michael Biehn) are a happily married couple on the verge of welcoming their first child. Unfortunately, during Abby’s pregnancy, a bunch of strange events begin to occur around the world that appear to correspond with the Biblical apocalypse. The Vatican employs Father Lucci (Peter Friedman – AKA Carl from Succession) to try to get to the bottom of this worrying development. Meanwhile, despite Abby’s pregnancy, the Quinn’s allow a weird man (Jürgen Prochnow) to move into their home as a lodger.
The frustrating thing here is that the idea of the seven plagues hitting modern day America is a solid one. The problem is the execution. There is way too much going on here. The apocalypse. A murder trial. A pregnancy. A lodger. It’s too much film for a genre that works best when at its most direct. At its worst, The Seventh Sign is a mess of film that borders on incoherence and doesn’t have anyone in the cast with enough charisma to carry the action through its duller moments (of which there are many).
The Seventh Sign lacks substance. It lacks weight. It’s not incompetent, however. In fact, visually, it’s got some real nice moments. But I can say that I watched this film from start to finish and the only emotion I felt was tedium. Essentially, there is no reason to watch this while ever Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen exist.
