Horror in the 90s The Unborn

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 

Movie Review: The Unborn

The Unborn (2009) 

Directed by David S. Goyer 

Written by David S. Goyer 

Starring Odette Yustman, Gary Oldman, Meagan Goode, Cam Gigandet, Idris Elba

Release Date January 9th, 2009 

Published January 10th, 2009

The Unborn is one of the more challenging moviegoing experiences I have had in my less than a decade as a film critic. It's not the films content that was challenging, the content is far too goofball to be challenging. No, the challenge was trying to keep a straight face as the desperate, sad cast made their paces through this slog of utterly ludicrous horror cliches.

Odette Yustman, one of the last people killed in J.J Abrams 2008 hit Cloverfield, stars in The Unborn as Casey, a pretty but bland teenager haunted by visions of a ghostly child. One night, as she is babysitting for a neighbor, the little boy she is watching bashes her over the head with a small mirror and tells her that Jumby (Yes, that isn't a typo, JUMBY) wants to be born now.

Jumby was the nickname that mom and dad gave to the twin who died in the womb next to Casey when she was born. Casey was unaware that she was supposed to be a twin and while that could be intriguing or dramatic, I was left wondering what Casey's embarrassing nickname was? Bumby? Tumby? That question is more interesting than any question posed in The Unborn. 

Casey comes to find that her grandmother also had a twin brother who died at Auschwitz, oh yes they drag the holocaust into this goofy plot. According to family lore, that twin died and was replaced by an evil spirit, a Dybbuk, a Jewish legend about an evil spirit. Granny killed her brother after his possession and the spirit has haunted her ever since.

Now the evil spirit wants Casey and she pins her hopes on an exorcism to save her. Gary Oldman plays a skeptical Rabbi who takes up the exorcism after he is visited by Spuds McKenzie, the former beer spokesman, only his head is upside down and he's lost that ridiculous Hawaiian shirt. You have to see it for yourself perhaps, but I assure it's as funny as my description of it. 

The Rabbi calls on a priest friend played by Idris Elba for help and several cannon fodder volunteers who will helpfully die on command once the spirit is unleashed. We know these characters are DOA at the exorcism because they don't even get names, they may as well have victim 1, victim 2 and so on, written on name tags.

Cam Gigandet, an actor who betrays fratboy douchebaggery with his every douchebag mannerism in both Never Back Down and Twilight brings that malevolent maleness to the good guy role of Casey's boyfriend who may as well also just line up as potential victim number 4. I'm being harsh about Gigandet, I can assume he is a nice person. His performances however, lead me to my insulting conclusions about his characters, if not the man playing them. 

The Unborn was written and directed by David S. Goyer who wrote the script for the first 2 awesome Blade movies and then directed the abysmal 3rd one. He co-wroter script of The Dark Knight. Can you see the pattern? Maybe Mr. Goyer should stick with the pen and leave the directing to someone else? Then again, even the writing stinks in The Unborn. 

The evil spirit inhabits a neighbor child, a friend, an upside down headed dog, the priest, and several others in the film but for some reason beyond explanation, the evil spirit cannot get his hands on Casey. This is purely due to Goyer's inability to come up with a logical reasoning behind any of the decisions he makes in this movie. Leaving the audience asking too many questions is a surprisingly typical writing failure from a usually more talented writer. 

Unwelcome logical question number 1: If the evil spirit can inhabit anyone it wants, why does he need Casey? Number 2: If he gets her, what does he do then? I realize these questions are entirely unwelcome, especially in a movie where the director is more interested in his choice of creepy looking bug -potato bug instead of the traditional cockroach, for those of you scoring your horror cliches at home- than in actually crafting an engaging horror thriller.

Watching The Unborn, it was a chore to keep from bursting out into gales of laughter at the ill logic of the terrifically awful staging and most unfortunately at the performance of Ms. Yustman who amounts to little more than a pout and a hair style. Yustman is not a bad actress, she's just unfortunately stuck in this silly, poorly thought out plot that undermines anything good she might bring to this movie. 

The Unborn is a movie that the folks at the sadly defunct Mystery Science Theater would have loved. It has that perfunctory B-list star, the slumming Gary Oldman, and the overall air of attempted atmosphere and self seriousness that Crow T. Robot and company so successfully took the air out of. The Unborn will make you long for The Crawling Eye or This Island Earth with its awfulness. By the way, I'm told that members of MST3K have new incarnations of the MST brand online. Maybe someone can sneak them a copy of The Unborn. One can only wish.