The Unborn UNRATED (2009)

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The Unborn UNRATED (2009)

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While babysitting a boy and his baby brother, Casey Beldon has a dreadful nightmare involving a weird dog and an evil child, and she tells her best friend Romy over the phone. Casey is haunted by this boy, and when she goes to the ophthalmologist, he asks if she has a twin brother or sister. She asks her father and discovers that her mother lost a son that died in the womb. Casey suspects that she is haunted by the spirit of her brother. She finds a letter addressed to a woman called Sofi Kozma and a creepy picture at home that belonged to her mother. She goes with Romy to a retirement home to meet Sofi, a survivor of the experiments during the Holocaust. But Sofi tells Casey that she had never met her mother and later calls Casey to tell her she is in great danger.

Niemals konnte Casey Bell (Odette Yustman) ihrer Mutter verzeihen, die sie als kleines Kind einfach verlassen hat. Erst als unerklarliche Dinge geschehen, beginnt Casey zu begreifen, dass es dafur gute Grunde gab. Schwere Alptraume plagen sie nachts und tagsuber hat es ein ubernaturliches Wesen auf sie abgesehen. Mithilfe des Spezialisten Sendak (Gary Oldman) ergrundet sie einen Familienfluch, dessen Ursprunge bis ins Deutschland der 30er Jahre reichen.

Hollywoods fuhrender Schreiber fur Horror und Phantastik, David S. Goyer ("Dark City", "Blade", "The Dark Knight"), erforscht nun als Regisseur menschliche Urangste in einer packenden Schreckensodyssee: Ein noch ungeborener Damon terrorisiert eine junge Frau.

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The Unborn UNRATED (2009)

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Brought to you by some of the same folks who produced the latest incarnations of The Hitcher, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, and Friday the 13th please, contain your excitement The Unborn treads familiar territory with the tale of a young teenage girl named Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman) who inexplicably becomes haunted by terrifying visions of a sullen-eyed waif (Ethan Cutkosky) her hallucinations have conveniently (and comically) dubbed Jumby. After a laughable encounter with a mirror-wielding baby-killer (did I mention the vicious psychopath in question is a four-year old kid?) and a trip to the doctor, Casey grills her father (James Remar) and learns she had a twin brother once upon a time who died in the womb. The nickname her father and mother (Carla Gugino) gave the unborn fetus? Jumby, of course.

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The Unborn UNRATED (2009)

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Before you can say derivative, Casey digs into her dead mother's past, tracks down a Holocaust survivor (Jane Alexander) willing to fulfill her every expositional desire, discovers she's actually being haunted by a Jewish spirit called a dybbuk, and hires a pair of exorcists (Gary Oldman and The Wire's Idris Elba, arriving far too late to save the film's young actors from their inexperience and bland line delivery) to boot the temperamental demon back to hell. But will she be able to protect her best friend Romy (Meagan Good) from being consumed by the evil entity? Will her cute-n-cuddly boy-toy, Mark (Cam Gigandet), live to tell the tale? Will we ever feel anything for any of these people? The answers are as predictable as Goyer's script, lurching from one plot point to the next without establishing a clearly defined set of rules (a must for supernatural horror of this ilk), a sense of prevailing logic, or even a consistent storyline; one that doesn't buckle under the pressures of the film's flaccid twists and turns.

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The Unborn UNRATED (2009)

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I wouldn't blame anyone for mistaking The Unborn for a straight-to-video entry in the Exorcist series. Unoriginal, unwieldy, and an unfortunate waste of talent, Goyer spends more time in his third feature film (after 2004's equally shallow Blade: Trinity and 2007's similarly underdeveloped Invisible) culling acclaimed classics of yesteryear than crafting any legitimate scares of his own. His over-polished jolts fall flat and his dialogue is as tedious and tiresome as a McDonald's late-night menu board… even a welcome third-act surge of twisting heads and mangled bodies fails to stir up any palpable fear or dread. Conventional mirror gags and skittering corpses dominate Goyer's repertoire, making it increasingly impossible to relish in the budding on-screen chaos. Worse still, his smooth-skinned cast compounds his floundering screenplay's every ill. Every pedestrian development is accompanied by the inane meanderings of a pack of lightweight featherweights all too eager to rob the story of any sense of urgency or authenticity. Oldman and Elba are nice additions to the proceedings, but tend to highlight the inadequacies of their younger castmates.

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The Unborn UNRATED (2009)

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While not as unwatchable as recent flops like Shutter and One Missed Call, The Unborn is as dull and lifeless as they come, offering genre fans the same victims and so-called scares they've endured a thousand times before without injecting anything remotely unique into the mix. Frankly, I expected a lot more from a filmmaker who has his creative hands in director Christopher Nolan's billion-dollar-plus Dark Knight pie. Ah well, at the least the Blu-ray edition of the flick boasts a solid AV presentation. On that note…

Kenneth Brown, blu-ray.com