The Unborn (1991)
Directed by Rodman Flender
Written by John Brancato, Michael Ferris
Starring Brooke Adams, Jeff Hayenga, K Callan, Kathy Griffin, Lisa Kudrow
Release Date March 29th, 1991
Box Office Gross $1.15 million dollars
The Unborn is part of a special subgenre of 90s horror, the laughable kind. Okay, fine, it's also a movie that wants to tap into the fears inherent in struggling to become a new parent and bring life into the world, but the film is truly laughable in that effort. Goofy special effect babies, over the top, shrill performances, and artless direction render The Unborn part of the Corman Classics, a group of cheap, often quite terrible films that Roger Corman artlessly pumped out of his mass manufactured movie company. While Corman's legend has earned a reappraisal for the careers he helped to launch, we should not forget the huckster Corman was at heart, a salesman crafting and selling faulty products at low, low prices.
Poor dewy-eyed Brooke Adams has the thankless task of playing the lead role in The Unborn. Adams plays Virginia, a children's book author who has been trying for several years to have a child with her milquetoast hubby, Brad, offering bland support and dodging any blame for their failure to conceive. In a desperate, last-ditch effort, the couple has agreed to see an experimental doctor with a new scientific approach to helping couples conceive. The new method is terrifying and painful involving a dark operating room and large needles. The production design is cheap but the lack of lights, at the very least, does create a sense of the unnatural.
The special new doctor is Dr. Richard Meyerling (James Karen), a man who has worked miracles for other families, though the nature of these miracles are slowly coming to light. In fact, the family that recommended that Virginia see Dr. Meyerling suffers a tragedy when the daughter born from Dr. Meyerling's experimental procedures begins showing sociopathic tendencies that end with her murdering her little brother while he slept. Other women have ended up before their baby is born and one woman, a new friend of Virgina's, ends up in a coma.
Find my full length review at Horror.Media
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