The Unborn

The Unborn is terrible on all levels. Making use of awful horror clichés, packed with unintentionally funny moments that the director thought would be scary, and putting a dent in the careers of Gary Oldman & Idris Alba, there isn't a thing about this turd that's redeemable, for it is one of the worst examples of its kind.

The Unborn tells the story of a young woman who starts having nightmarish hallucinations about a kid with bright blue eyes, which soon escalate & continue to intensify in the subsequent days, thus compelling her to get to the root of all this. Eventually, she learns that an evil entity is trying to take possession of her body.

Written & directed by David S. Goyer, The Unborn jumps right into the middle without any proper introduction or foundation, and expects the viewers to jump aboard just like that. The characters are cardboard cutouts who have to utter garbage dialogues for 87 long minutes, and none of them are worthy of any emotional investment.

Even worse are its cheap attempts to scare, for most of those moments simply turn out to be lame, silly & predictable. Cold colour palette is finely utilised yet camera-work is sluggish, Editing isn't up to the mark either, for it is unable to provide a smooth narrative flow & also paces it unevenly. And further hurting it are its slew of bad performances.

On an overall scale, The Unborn is a poorly directed, lazily scripted & shoddily performed horror that's never for once compelling, takes uninspiring shortcuts at every available opportunity, and concludes with a wholly uninspiring finale that's devoid of any tension or terror. In a sentence, it's one of those instantly forgettable flicks that aren't worthy of your time & money. So just skip it.

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.

Having seen the trailers for 'Unborn' and admiring David S. Goyer's writing talents on films such as 'The Dark Knight' I was kind of looking forward to it. I knew it wouldn't be much more than a typical Hollywood attempt at horror but I thought I'd get at least 90 minutes of entertainment out of it. I was wrong.

The story is terribly contrived and goes through the typical horror story motions from start to finish: childhood trauma - check! Nightmares - check! It also takes so much content from other films its unbelievable. More unbelievable is the fact that it botches these 'homages' every time. The film plods on and on attempting to at least get a jump out of you (which it fails at) until finally you get to the finale. Needless to say, the finale is also terrible. More so because at least the one thing the film does manage to do is contain the odd decent special effect. However, the finale for some reason doesn't contain any of these effects and resorts to actors merely wearing contact lenses.

I'm perhaps being a bit harsh giving the film a 3/10 but given the actors involved and David S. Goyer's obvious writing talent, this film really should have delivered far more.

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.

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.