Eye Candy #226 - "The Unborn"

The Unborn: A movie firmly in line with Woodchuck’s #1 Rule of Film – Nothing is scarier than little dead kids. Casey Beldon begins to have nightmares and waking dreams in which she is confronted by a little dead boy. Soon, the little boy is appearing to others, with bad nastiness usually befalling the victim. Turns out that Casey was a twin, one of which died in the womb, and her family has been haunted by a dybbuk (an evil spirit) since World War 2, that wants to use Casey as a gateway into the living world. She enlists the help of a rabbi (Gary Oldman) and his helpers (including Idris Elba) to exorcise the dybbuk, but things go awry. Clocking in at less than 90 minutes, this film has more weird imagery than horror to it. It was written and directed by David Goyer, who helped write both of the new Batman movies and a personal fave of mine, “Blade 2”, but his output as director has been largely disappointing. I have no idea what Oldman and Elba are doing slumming in this film, as I think it’s beneath both of them (though Elba has taken some lousy scripts recently; Dude! You were in “The Wire”! And that means you don’t have to star in the remake of “Prom Night”!). Nothing really remarkable here, though the little dead boy is appropriately creepy. That’s just not enough to carry the whole film. The 80’sesque schlock horror revival is in full swing. Woodchuck sez, “Skip it.”