"Blessed are the filmmakers, for they shall entertain and inform and bring great joy to fellow man. Yet greed driveth them and rare are their powers of original thought. Theirs is to repeat and to resurrect. And oft, it is folly.

Lo, after one score years and ten, man shall return to the story of Damien, spawn of the Beast. Yet where the first incarnation brought revelation and fear and foreboding, the second coming shall be devoid of same.

Like the snail shall it proceed, deviating not from what went before.

And though legion are the arguments against its creation, the Devil's advocates shall find one. And it shall be a date. 6-6-06.

Yet those seeking instant fortune shall not be so smug when the World Cup kicks off three days later..."

The Gospel According to Hollywood, 6: 66

While no abomination, there is nothing here that wasn't done better 30 years ago.

Returning writer David Seltzer's six-six-sixth sense of invention has deserted him and, worse still, Jerry Goldsmith's score isn't a patch on his Oscar-winning earlier work.

It begins with a priest wowing the Pope with a funkily edited presentation at the Vatican. The end of the world in glorious PowerPoint.

At a nearby hospital, US diplomat Robert Thorn (Schreiber) is told that his son just died at birth. A priest persuades him to take a baby whose mother died giving birth the same night. Wife Kate (Stiles) is kept in the dark.

The freakish death of Thorn's boss sees him promoted and posted to London. There, Damien grows into little horror Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, all raven hair and blue-eyed stares.

All's well until Damien's sixth birthday party, when his nanny hangs herself and is replaced by the diabolical Mrs Baylock (played by Mia Farrow, who knows all about Beelzebub's bairns having had one herself in Rosemary's Baby).

The Thorns come to realise that there's something not right about the lad. Animals don't like him, other kids don't like him, hell, even they don't like him. And the wallpaper in his bedroom tells its own tale...

Robert is finally convinced by a paparazzo (Thewlis) who shows him some portentous photographs, after which a raving priest (Postlethwaite) comes to a sticky end.

That sixy birthmark on Damien's head seals it: the boy dies or we're all doomed.

By the time most people read this, 6-6-06 will have passed. Which means that 20th Century Fox's marketing department will have to come up with something fiendishly clever for the DVD release.

After all, the Devil makes work for idle hands.

Elliott Noble