You know what’s scary? Being chased around by a ghost. Oh and you know what would be even scarier? If the ghost wasn’t just chasing you but wanted to possess you body! Oh oh and what if the ghost was actually your dead evil twin whom you murdered in the womb? Oh oh oh and what if the ghost was actually created as a result of Nazi experiments during the holocaust! Congratulations you’ve just see The Unborn, an early contender for worst movie of the year.
It’s a minor triumph that it’s not in the running for worst movie ever made. The Unborn is saved from that fate only by the late-game presence of Gary Oldman, who shows up for no particular reason to play a Rabbi attempting to exorcise the demon from the movie’s obligatory hot chick victim. Of course the demon isn’t actually inside her at all, so why he’d try to exorcise it from her is something of a mystery. After all the entire point of the film is that the demon wants to be inside her, and if it were already inside her then it wins and the movie’s over. Still, Oldman shows up to try… something anyway and while there’s no way he can save this movie at least he can act, which is more than can be said for the rest of the cast.
The Unborn is at its worst early on when, instead of bothering to introduce any of the protagonists it simply launches into a litany of bad horror movie clichés. The experience of sitting through the first half of the movie is much like watching the longest horror movie trailer you’ve ever seen. There’s no connecting threads between any of what’s going on, the movie just flips from one supposedly scary sequence to the next. I don’t think it even stops to tell us the main character’s name. What is her name? I’ve forgotten, and I just walked out of the theater ten minutes ago.
The no name girl in question is played by Odette Yustman. I refuse to refer to her as an actress. She was also in Cloverfield, where her bad acting was probably easier to mask hidden behind that awful shaky cam. The fact that she’s gotten more than one gig in this industry must be attributed to her lean and sexy figure, not her acting which is non-existent. She does at least look delicious, you can kind of see why a ghost would want to get in her. Hey maybe he's not trying to possess her, maybe he just wants a date.
I refuse to waste any more of my day on this movie. There’s no excusing it. It’s as if the worst parts of every bad horror movie ever made were stitched together into a single turd and splattered in front of a camera. It’s terrible. I’ve warned you. I’ve done my duty. Now let’s never speak of this movie again.
Side note: If I ever have the pleasure of meeting the stunningly beautiful and extremely talented Carla Gugino, I now know the only question I want to ask her. Why would you take a pointless, non-speaking cameo role as a grungy, deceased mother in an obviously dead-end, throwaway film like The Unborn? Was it because Gary Oldman was in it? I bet it was because Gary Oldman was in it. Well at least Oldman had lines. What’s your excuse?
