The Unborn

This is a movie that really picks up in the second act. The first half relies a little too heavily on predictable spooks that don't make a lot of sense, and flaunting the main actress about in revealing clothing. However after a certain point you can notice the film starting to focus and becoming more creative and daring.

I'm only familiar with the Unrated DVD version, but given the choice it's often the most complete version anyhow.

In music and sound effects, you'll notice obvious influences from The Grudge, but nothing that is a plain ripoff. Fans of Silent Hill will see some influence as well which spices up the second half quite a bit. You need to stick with it, and get past the uninspired, cookie-cutter horror bits in order to see what is really being offered from this film.

Funny thing. Just before this weekend I was thinking to myself, 'Where the hell are all the bad movies? About time you searched one out, lad.' Phew! In the nick of time "The Unborn" turned up.

Make no mistake, "The Unborn" was a real stinker. A horror in the worst sense of the word. I cannot imagine the wager that fine actors like Gary Oldman and Carla Gugino must have lost to get them to appear in this poo, but it must have been a big one.

Hurrah! There were some good things.

Some of the twisted body imagery was quite effective. (It was effective when it first appeared in "The Exorcist", twenty six years ago.) Also, Megan Fox lookalike Odette Yustman looked quite nice in her underwear.

Boo! There were many more bad things.

A predictable plot, cobbled together from a million other direct-to-video movies. No tension or scares whatsoever, with every story twist sign posted miles ahead. Awful acting, of course, with 'best friend' Meagan Good being top of the list of shame. Slow, boring, terrible.

I thought that "The Unborn" was absolutely dreadful. A rotten film.

Avoid.

I've read a lot of comments on this movie, I didn't think it was all bad. I have seen better horror movies, but this certainly wasn't the worst, someone said, that it was unoriginal, but I thought that the plot was quite original, I don't recall seeing anything similar before, but then, that's my opinion. I thought Odette Yustman was a fair leading actress as Casey and I thought her best friend Romey was quite entertaining. I have this film downloaded onto my computer, I probably would not have paid to see it at the cinema, but it's a good freebie, I've watched it several times and still find it fun to watch. I think it is worth watching.

OK, let me get this out in the open immediately: this movie is pretty predictable if you have been watching any 'new' American Horror flick within the past five years, complete with gratuitous shots of Fox's, excuse me, Yutsman's backside. To its credit, the movie does have a great amount of potential from the source material, but fails to give birth to it. The effects are well done, the acting is decent (for the genre at least), and I left the movie feeling that I was at least entertained for the last 87 min (although I did wish that they would have cut out 10min. or so in the middle and made the final confrontation longer and better).

If you already like watching these kinds of movies, the Unborn certainly doesn't try to do anything different then what has already been done, and is worth watching; But you are expecting a radical departure from the typical Horror flick, this ain't it.

What is it with movies that spend more time concentrating on nightmares than what is really happening? Don't these movie makers know that nightmares aren't really scary unless they are your own? When something freaky happens in a movie and then the character wakes up to reality that isn't scary. What is scary is when the nightmare becomes reality, like in Nightmare on Elm Street. But when someone sees bugs coming out of the walls and blood or something coming up from the toilet and monsters and all sorts of things in a public restroom and then some people walk in but none of that is there anymore all we can think is that the character in question is hallucinating which isn't very scary unless we really really care about the character. The thrills in this movie are so forced that they are boring. Very, very disappointed. Even some of the straight to DVD titles have scared me more than this formula.