Beware the Boy-faced Dog

Bone-head Evil lurks behind blue eyes in Unborn.
By
Morgan P salvo


I see too many horror movies. So The Unborn had better do something special. Guess what? It doesn’t. The Unborn is not scary enough to be good and too serious to be “so bad it’s good”. The flick is a gab-fest generic possession story that goes beyond absurd and WAY beyond caring if it makes sense or not.
The convoluted mess of a plot doesn’t even try to win you over; it just employs one sad old trick after another; a crumbling insane asylum, tricky mirrors and doorways --- there’s even the medicine cabinet mirror trick that I have complained about so often. The newest twists thrown in are Jewish folklore, the Kabbalah and Jerusalem crickets. The snappy dialogue tries to distract by coming off as witty but it’s so off the hook that you’ll want to run out and rent your favorite horror movie to wash the memory out of your eyes.
The gist is that doe-eyed Casey (Odette Yustmen) is plagued by bad dreams that start coming true involving a boy faced dog with an upside down head, a mysterious blue glove, a lot of snarling fangs and blue eyes, and a menacing possessed boy (looking like a “Malcolm in the Middle” refugee).Then there’s a group of supremely immature college friends—the only way you know they’re not in high school is that they go out and have cocktails. After gratuitous scenes in which Casey shows us what she looks like almost naked in skin-tight jeans and/or panties, she pulls out all her detective skills. Assisted by best friend Romy (Meagan Good) they find her long lost grandmother Sofi (Jane Alexander) in an old folk’s home. Their most pertinent deduction is that someone smells like diarrhea.
Alexander uses the oldest form of bad German dialect ever---just saying V instead of W with no accent whatsoever. Blathering away, she tells a story that’s so infused with idiocy and fiction that it defies comprehension. Turns out Casey’s mom had a twin who died before childbirth and now is a “dybbuk” trying to posses and inhabit a body in the mortal world. There is also a link to the past involving Auschwitz and Nazis conducting genetic experiments and messing with the occult (last time they did this we got Hellboy). Their horrid experiments included fabricating brown eyes to blue—to think after all these years that’s what Crystal Gayle was singing about.
The writing really suffers the most when Casey confronts people about her troubles. They feign ignorance, but within seconds are regurgitating volumes of info to instill even more unbelievable tripe. Case in point: when plainclothes Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman) first says he doesn’t understand the Kabbalah all that well, within days has translated and assembled a TV crew complete with a Catholic priest to help perform an exorcism. Oldman is so bland in this role it boggles the mind. I used to go see movies he was in just to see what diabolical/maniacal take on a character he would devise. It’s simply not the case here.
The writer/director David S. Goyer, responsible for co-writing The Dark Knight (which was also all over the map), keeps his direction here too heavy handed and slicked up, no doubt prompted by producer Michael Bay who seems intent on destroying all the perfect horror movies of the 70’s (Texas Chainsaw Massacre Friday The 13th). The Unborn attempts a Ring or Grudge atmosphere but let’s face it--this one isn’t even based on a Japanese horror movie so it only has itself to blame.
The verbal spewing of nonsense in The Unborn, trying to corner the market as a Jewish version of The Exorcist, is enough to numb your mind. I predict most people will only sit through this debacle waiting for the next jolt-scare or vicious blue-eyed-fang-face or unexplained slimy tentacles to squirm out of a wall or the next gratuitous barf scene or the preposterous fictitious symptoms by doctors or oh… forget it. A sequel is set up, but somehow I don’t think this franchise will survive. It’s only saving grace is it might be the perfect rentable laugh-a-thon.

The Unborn
Starring Odette Yustman, Gary Oldman Jane Alexander
 Written directed by David S. Goyer

1 star (for the upside down dog head).