Il mai nato

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.

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.

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.

Just saw The Unborn, when I saw the trailer I thought well this might actually be a good little horror flick. While I would not say this was a terrible movie, it unfortunately did have some mistakes.

This entire film is basically a marathon of shocks, crazy situations and (some) pretty creepy ghosts/demons, so I guess, being a horror fan, thats a good thing, right? well, in this case, its not. The Unborn certainly does not lack in the horror department, showcasing some rather creepy moments, but unfortunately the movie lacks of any suspense, buildup, character development, nor does it have a good script.

Odette Yustman does pretty good, but it's not her fault her performance comes through less, its the script. The movie, from the exact second it begins, delivers 'scare' after scare after scare, but the sad thing is, its not that scary because you don't care about the characters or the story, and there's no buildup whatsoever to speak of.

Its actually a terrible waste, because this movie could have been a solid genre effort, too bad the director/ writer chose the easy way out, and delivered what is one the laziest, been-there-done-that productions of the year.

Entertaining it is to some degree, but its not a full recommendation