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.

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.

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.

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.