Born Under a Bad Sign

The Unborn
Movie review by Spyder Darling

Equal parts Nightmare on Elm Street, The Omen and The Exorcist, The Unborn is a sit-through-able supernatural thriller, starring Odette Yustman as Casey Beldon, a comely co-ed whose disturbing dreams of a ghostly child with a menacing message that somehow connects to her mother’s depression and subsequent suicide.

After rummaging around her family’s big old house, the perfect location for expected but nonetheless effective knee jerk frights, Casey follows a trail of uncanny clues to a sinister sanitarium where she meets her long lost grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor whose tale of unspeakable Nazi experiments conclude the only way Casey can save herself from certain demonic doom is an exorcism. Preposterous? Sure, but tell that to diminishing circle of family and friends.

Enter Sendak (Gary Oldman) a reluctant rabbi who, with the help of a sacred text borrowed from a local library attempts to shut a doorway from beyond our world that has been pried open by someone who was never born. Or something like that.

For a PG-13 fright flick, Writer/director David Goyer (Blade: Trinity, The Invisible, Batman Begins) has crafted a passably terrifying glimpse into the life of the undead in The Unborn. While not as scary as its influences, the New York Times financial section, or a New York Knicks box score, it’ll take your mind off the madness of modern day life for a 96 minutes and that’s not kid stuff by any means.