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Back in 1993 I saw the worst movie I’ve ever experienced, The Judas Project. It was an amateurish, inadvisably contemporary retelling of the Gospels, using a mostly volunteer cast (one exception was the woman who played Gozer the Gozerian in Ghostbusters), that sat on the shelf for years until the makers raised enough money to pay for some resurrection special effects at the movie’s climax.
Now, in yet another example that the church should know better than to utilize a medium it so roundly despises, comes a cinematic version of events leading up to The Apocalypse, The Omega Code. Starting with a limited release in a few Bible Belt states, this project from cable’s Trinity Broadcasting Network began showing more widely after it surprisingly broke into the boxoffice top ten on strength of church-based word of mouth and ads on religious radio and TV stations. So I finally got around to seeing it, and I must say that, although it joins Judas on my personal list of worsts, I did laugh a lot. So hang on while I try to type this out between paroxysms of hysteria.
Starting with a Star Wars-meets-Charlton Heston opening crawl reading, “The Bible Code -- a mathematical phenomenon whose hidden messages are said to contain the whole of human history,” Omega posits that the scriptures, or at least the Old Testament, are, like Sonic the Hedgehog, filled with hidden tricks and clues that will help you get to the end of the game if you figure them out. As the film opens, European industrialist Stone Alexander (Michael York) sends his evil henchman Dominic (Michael Ironside) -- who you know must be really nasty since in addition to being an assassin he’s a gay ex-Catholic priest who smokes -- to steal a CD-ROM from a Jerusalem cleric who’s discovered “a holographic, three-dimensional computer code” that shows the Bible is really “a giant crossword puzzle” which predicted Hitler, the Kennedy assassinations, even the death of Princess Di (!). But two angelic beings intervene to prevent Dom from taking the final element of the code, so Stone is left with a program that causes his own computer to spit out Nostradamic fortune cookies such as “SINGLE LANE LEADS THE WAY,” “CORNERSTONE LAYS FOUNDATION,” and “SEVEN HORNS BOW TO WOUNDED HEAD.”
Using this information, Stone gets elected head of the European Union (long a favorite fundamentalist bugbear), and ushers in an era of world prosperity replete with such scientific miracles as superfoods, cheap desalination plants, and “a revolutionary new technology that neutralizes atomic weaponry.” He hires a square-jawed goodguy wavering atheistic American motivational speaker named Gillen Lane (Casper Van Dien, from Starship Troopers) as his minister of information, who helps him broker peace between Jews and Arabs and talk them into letting him rebuild King Solomon’s temple. Three-and-a-half peaceful years later, Dominic shoots Stone in the head in a fit of jealousy, who returns from the dead as the Antichrist, proclaims himself King of the World, and has the two angelic prophets killed. They come back to life and things take a turn for the worse -- “the ocean’s molecular structure has somehow mutated!” -- but Stone finally gets the final part of the code with help from a treacherous newswoman (Catherine Oxenberg, from the old primetime soap “Dynasty,” probably onboard because she’s Casper's real-life wife and the producers got some sort of two-for-one deal) and orders a nuke strike on Israel: “Initiate the Jerusalem Plan!” I don’t want to spoil the ending, but, if you’ve read Revelation you already know He -- the big capital “h” He -- returns.
An amazing amalgamation of James Bond, James Dobson, “Nikita,” right-wing Christian conspiracy theory, Raiders of the Lost Ark effects, black helicopters, astoundingly bad acting, and not a single “hell” or “damn” anywhere, The Omega Code -- which credits 70s doomsaying author Hal “The Late Great Planet Earth” Lindsey as “Biblical Prophecy Consultant” -- is an attempt to legitimize literally interpreted didactic evangelistic cheese in a flashy package. Though it fails miserably, it also inspires awful fascination akin to watching a bucket of worms breeding, and maybe moreso than any movie in my experience, must be seen to be believed. F
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