Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland play two sets of identical twins who are mismatched at birth shortly before the French Revolution. One pair is reared as royalty; the other is raised as the children of peasants. The plot in this film by Bud Yorkin is a wonderful mishmash of Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Moli?re, with the peasant brothers joining the revolutionaries while their bizarrely foppish siblings eat cake and ignore the events around them.
When Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) gives birth to a stillborn baby, her husband Robert (Gregory Peck) shields her from the devastating truth and substitutes an orphaned infant for their own - unaware of the child's satanic origins. The horror begins on Damien's fifth birthday when his nanny stages a dramatic suicide. Soon after, a priest who tries to warn Damien's father is killed in a freakish accident. As the death toll mounts, Robert realizes his son is the Antichrist and decides he must kill the boy to prevent him from fulfilling a cataclysmic prophecy.
