Goyer gives birth to a stinker with The Unborn

By Faheem Ahmed     1/15/09 6:00pm

The only thing this movie got right is its title, because after a single viewing, viewers will wish it had crawled back into its cinematic womb and died.The Unborn churned out a solid financial performance at the box office - $21.1 million - on a very slow weekend with little competition. When news of its low critical approval, which reached a pathetic 13 percent on RottenTomatoes.com, spreads to the public, its box office total should plummet. But how did the film sell out hundreds of theaters on opening night? The trailer.

The trailer for The Unborn is well-edited, promising a smorgasbord of horrors and generating a lot of undeserved hype. Just like most Hollywood trailers, however, it gives away the most frightening sequence in the entire film: an upside-down, crawling sexagenarian with a twisted head.

The premise of the movie is somewhat original. Odette Yustman (Cloverfield) plays Casey Beldon, a sexy coed who prances around the house in tight cotton panties - another highlight the trailer reveals - and has a completely obedient and supportive boyfriend, plus an ethnic best friend who brings in da' funk and is oh so sassy! Sounds like an awesome plot, right?

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But wait, there's just one problem: Casey's grandmother's twin brother was mutated by Nazis, mistakenly inhabited by a dybbuk (a Jewish demon from the netherworld) and has been attempting to possess Casey and her relatives for the past three generations!

The movie kicks off with a promising nightmare sequence filled with some disturbing images, notably a dog wearing a porcelain mask, but viewers find out later that this is completely random and has nothing to do with the plot. After that, the movie descends into the familiar formula of predictable scares and hilariously bad dialogue.

In one scene, Casey babysits a creepy five-year-old and his infant brother. She hears weird noises coming from the baby monitor and decides to investigate, but does not turn on any of the lights and slowly walks up the stairs at about one mile per hour.

In another hilariously awkward scene, Casey's boyfriend, played by meathead Cam Gigandet (Twilight), attempts to launch into a profound speech to comfort the terrified Casey: "Don't you, like, get terrified by the world spinning ... you know, like, so fast that we could like fall off into empty space? Ugh, I'm such a douche bag." Okay, so it's not a direct quote from the movie, but you get the gist.

The scene that takes the cake as one of the funniest unintentional "WTF" moments in cinema occurs when Casey gets sick at a nightclub and stumbles to the bathroom. After vomiting into the toilet, she looks up and notices an odd hole at waist level in the stall's wall. At this point, everyone in the theater erupted into nervous laughter. There is no way they put a glory hole in this movie! As she moves closer and closer to the hole, hundreds of nasty beetles start pouring out of the orifice. Needless to say, the theater let out a collective sigh of disappointment.

The Unborn would've fared much better as a horror spoof; the major problem is that it takes itself too seriously. The mythology behind Nazi experimentation seems interesting, but it is conveyed sporadically and ludicrously.

This confusion and general feeling of "what the hell is going on?" can be attributed to the horrendous editing. One scene would end 30 seconds too soon and almost immediately cut to another scene, resulting in a disjointed and disorienting film experience.

The biggest surprise was that the film was written and directed by David S. Goyer, who could be legitimately hailed as a genius for writing The Dark Knight and Batman Begins. What was this guy smoking? You would think a veteran like Goyer would have known from the start that this movie sucked.

Another major surprise is that Goyer got Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight's Jim Gordon) to play a role in the movie. Not just any ordinary role, but a rabbi who can translate archaic textbooks. Oldman is extremely versatile and talented, which is why it is so baffling that he would agree to be in this movie.

Sadly, he is guilty of some of the randomness thrown in to confuse the audience. During Yustman's exorcism, he blows into a huge animal horn because ... it unsettles the demon? Also, the dybbuk possesses the bodies of around thirty different people, but it's fixated on Yustman because ... it enjoys the taste of her bloodline? It inhabited the body of a little kid in a concentration camp during the Holocaust! What is so freaking sweet about that?

Additionally, throughout the movie, Yustman sees her creepy five-year-old neighbor standing in her yard in the middle of the night. What the hell is he doing out there? Where are is his parents? What if he catches a cold?

If you couldn't already tell, The Unborn is terrible. The trailer is fantastic, but it reveals the only good parts of the movie. It's a great flick to rent with your friends if you want to die laughing at how bad it is. The Unborn should have stayed right were it belonged - in the dark netherworld of Goyer's imagination.

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