The Unborn

If The Unborn is not truly terrible, it's only because it's so incredibly generic. The movie plays like an explosion at the horror cliche factory, and the audience is left to point out the numerous references and moments that it rips off from other films. To be fair, the movie does have one new idea. It opens with its heroine having a dream where she's jogging down an empty road, sees a mitten that belongs to a creepy-looking dead kid (Ethan Cutkoski), and is led into the woods by a dog wearing a paper Halloween mask, where she finds a demonic human fetus buried under some leaves. Hey, I said it was a new idea, not a good one.

Writer-director David S. Goyer (The Invisible) got his start writing straight to video schlock like Demonic Toys and Kickboxer 2. He's moved on to better things (Batman Begins), but you get the sense with The Unborn that this is one of his scripts that have been lying at the bottom of his desk drawer since his humble beginnings. In the movie, a college student named Casey (Odette Yustman from Cloverfield) is haunted by visions of the previously mentioned creepy dead kid (the dog never again appears before her), her dead mother (who killed herself years ago), and keeps on being attacked by slimy bugs that pop out of egg shells when she's making breakfast. Dad's away on a business trip, so she's all alone in the house, giving the dead kid plenty of chances to pop out of dark shadows and scream at her. The kid sure does get around. He even manages to cram himself into Casey's medicine cabinet, just so he can yell at her when she opens it. Despite the support of her best friend Romy (Meagan Good) and boyfriend Mark (Cam Gigandet), Casey thinks she's losing her mind. A convenient trip to the basement reveals some musty old newspaper articles and old home movies that lead her to Sofi (Jane Alexander), a woman in a nursing home who may hold the answers she's looking for and may have a personal connection with Casey's forgotten past.

Casey learns fairly early on that she was supposed to have a twin brother, but he died in their mother's womb. This somehow has ties to a demonic spirit that is trying to enter our world by means of possession. Apparently, the demon can enter any body it chooses (the kid next door whom Casey babysits, an old man at the nursing home, a priest, etc.), but for some reason, it has a personal grudge against Casey's family. It all has something to do with an event that happened to Sofi when she was a little girl in a Nazi concentration camp. Yes, that's right, this cheesy supernatural flick works the Holocaust into its plot. Fortunately for Casey, Sofi's been reading up on this demon, and can supply her and us the audience with all the information and musty old books we could ever want to fill in the plot holes. (Well, some of them. Most still remain open and gaping.) She also directs Casey to a local Rabbi (Gary Oldman, who I assume got a nice paycheck out of appearing in this. Either that, or a nice trailer where he could have privacy for long, sad talks with his agent in-between takes.), who can help her perform an exorcism to get rid of the spirit haunting her. The climactic exorcism scene has to be seen to be believed, as it seems to have been a personal challenge by Goyer to see how many bad religious horror cliches he could fit into a single scene.

I'm trying to make sense out of this movie while I write about it. Why does Casey react to plot developments like the neighbor kid being possessed by a demonic entity that wants to kill her and her friends with such casual indifference? Why does she strut around in her underwear in so many scenes to the point I felt like I was watching a Fruit of the Loom ad crossed with The Exorcist? When Sofi is being chased by an old man possessed by the demonic spirit through the retirement home late at night, where are there no staff members around? What did the bugs have to do with anything, and why did they keep on appearing? Is it really that easy to steal a massive, thousand-year-old book on demons from a library with no one noticing or asking questions? If the demon is possessing the neighbor kid, why is Casey the only one who notices? Wouldn't the boy's parents think something's up with Junior? ("Gee, I don't know, honey. Our son didn't used to stare ominously at everyone, and knife people in the stomach just for looking at him...") Why doesn't the Rabbi tell Casey about his encounter with the demonic dog with the upside down head that appears before him late one night? Why go on?...

You know what? Forget what I said earlier about The Unborn just being generic. This movie stinks. Aside from some decent atmosphere and one or two effective but cheap jump scares, this is almost entirely bottom of the barrel stuff. Maybe I said it was only generic because I saw Bride Wars immediately after this, and I hated that one even more. This is an unholy mess of half-baked ideas and cliches looking for a point, of which there is none. I'm getting a headache just trying to sort this movie out, so I'm just going to take an Advil and stop talking about it.

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