Starring: Odette Yustman, Gary Oldman, Meagan Good, Jane Alexander.
Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.
Rated: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and terror, disturbing images, thematic material and language including some sexual references.
Let's treat the horror film "The Unborn" as a teachable moment. The movie's not very good, but there are ideas, good and bad, in its execution that are worth mulling over.
Cast the best actors you can afford. If you can get Jane Alexander to play a Holocaust survivor, James Remar as a two-scenes dad, Carla Gugino as a ghost-mom with no lines in her flashback scenes and Gary Oldman and Idris Elba as a rabbi and a priest who moonlight as exorcists (hey, we all have to take on second jobs in this economy), you do it.
Putting your skinny young leading lady (Odette Yustman of "Cloverfield") in panties in several scenes and on the poster? Again, smart move. Know your audience for PG-13 horror. Yustman, an indifferent Jennifer Connelly clone, is so thin you could roll a bagel, with lox, between those thighs. Not that you'd want to do that sort of thing.
But this fright show from writer-director David S. Goyer ("The Invisible," and he wrote the awful "Jumper") is a maddening hodgepodge of plot distractions, gimmick fights and too many characters. It's a pretty but pretty cluttered, un-frightening mess that brings in the Holocaust, Jewish myth and mysticism, mental illness, unsafe sex and a very strange-looking little boy (Atticus Shafer) who seems willing to hurt people to get a message to his baby-sitter, Casey (Yustman): "Jumby wants to be born now."
This freaks out Casey and sends her running to her boyfriend's arms (Cam Gigandet) and off to seek help from her superstitious friend (Meagan Good, another plum in the cast). As Casey hallucinates more visions of dogs with their heads upside down and demons in her medicine cabinet, she recalls her dead mom (Gugino) and begins to decipher this mystery, which is why she goes to the rabbi (Oldman, professional as always).
There are hair-raising moments here, though they're not the shock-edits (complete with loud musical effect) that Goyer hurls at us, the bugs or even the creepy dogs and people whose heads spin around upside to mimic the Dybbuk, an evil spirit described in Jewish folklore. A scratchy old home movie is the most chilling bit. But who takes home movies of the place where Mom was institutionalized and hung herself? And black-and-white home movies from "six years ago"?
Finally, a word of caution to parents wanting to turn their little darlings into child stars. It's bad enough naming your lad Atticus. He's going to get teased until his classmates see or read "To Kill a Mockingbird." Cashing in on your child's odd appearance (it's not makeup) is kind of creepy, no? He was a punch-line in "American Carol," too. Let him age out of his Eddie Munster years in peace.
Cast the best actors you can afford. If you can get Jane Alexander to play a Holocaust survivor, James Remar as a two-scenes dad, Carla Gugino as a ghost-mom with no lines in her flashback scenes and Gary Oldman and Idris Elba as a rabbi and a priest who moonlight as exorcists (hey, we all have to take on second jobs in this economy), you do it.
Putting your skinny young leading lady (Odette Yustman of "Cloverfield") in panties in several scenes and on the poster? Again, smart move. Know your audience for PG-13 horror. Yustman, an indifferent Jennifer Connelly clone, is so thin you could roll a bagel, with lox, between those thighs. Not that you'd want to do that sort of thing.
But this fright show from writer-director David S. Goyer ("The Invisible," and he wrote the awful "Jumper") is a maddening hodgepodge of plot distractions, gimmick fights and too many characters. It's a pretty but pretty cluttered, un-frightening mess that brings in the Holocaust, Jewish myth and mysticism, mental illness, unsafe sex and a very strange-looking little boy (Atticus Shafer) who seems willing to hurt people to get a message to his baby-sitter, Casey (Yustman): "Jumby wants to be born now."
This freaks out Casey and sends her running to her boyfriend's arms (Cam Gigandet) and off to seek help from her superstitious friend (Meagan Good, another plum in the cast). As Casey hallucinates more visions of dogs with their heads upside down and demons in her medicine cabinet, she recalls her dead mom (Gugino) and begins to decipher this mystery, which is why she goes to the rabbi (Oldman, professional as always).
There are hair-raising moments here, though they're not the shock-edits (complete with loud musical effect) that Goyer hurls at us, the bugs or even the creepy dogs and people whose heads spin around upside to mimic the Dybbuk, an evil spirit described in Jewish folklore. A scratchy old home movie is the most chilling bit. But who takes home movies of the place where Mom was institutionalized and hung herself? And black-and-white home movies from "six years ago"?
Finally, a word of caution to parents wanting to turn their little darlings into child stars. It's bad enough naming your lad Atticus. He's going to get teased until his classmates see or read "To Kill a Mockingbird." Cashing in on your child's odd appearance (it's not makeup) is kind of creepy, no? He was a punch-line in "American Carol," too. Let him age out of his Eddie Munster years in peace.
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