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The Unborn (2009)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:103
Fresh:12
Rotten:91
Average Rating:3.2/10
Consensus: David Goyer's Unborn is a tame genre effort with cheap thrills and scares that border on silliness.
Rated: PG-13 [See Full Rating] for intense sequences of violence and terror, disturbing images, thematic material and language including some sexual references.
Runtime: 88 mins
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Theatrical Release:Jan 9, 2009 Wide
Box Office: $42,638,165
Synopsis:
Sometimes the soul of a dead person has been so tainted with evil that it is denied entrance to heaven. It must endlessly wander the borderlands between worlds, desperately searching for a new body...
Sometimes the soul of a dead person has been so tainted with evil that it is denied entrance to heaven. It must endlessly wander the borderlands between worlds, desperately searching for a new body to inhabit.
And sometimes it actually succeeds.
Writer/director David Goyer (Blade: Trinity, The Invisible, Batman Begins) gives a terrifying glimpse into the life of the undead in The Unborn, a supernatural thriller that follows a young woman pulled into a world of nightmares when a demonic spirit haunts her and threatens everyone she loves.
Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman) hated her mother for leaving her as a child. But when inexplicable things start to happen, Casey begins to understand why she left. Plagued by merciless dreams and a tortured ghost that haunts her waking hours, she must turn to the only spiritual advisor, Sendak (Gary Oldman), who can make it stop.
With Sendak's help, Casey uncovers the source of a family curse dating back to Nazi Germany--a creature with the ability to inhabit anyone or anything that is getting stronger with each possession. With the curse unleashed, her only chance at survival is to shut a doorway from beyond our world that has been pried open by someone who was never born. --© Rogue Pictures
Starring: Odette Yustman, Gary Oldman, Meagan Good, Idris Elba
Starring: Odette Yustman, Gary Oldman, Meagan Good, Idris Elba, Cam Gigandet, James Remar, Jane Alexander
Director: David Goyer
Director: David Goyer
Screenwriter: David Goyer
Producer: Michael Bay, Andrew Form, Brad Fuller
Composer: Ramin Djawadi
Studio: Rogue Arts
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Reviews for The Unborn
The Unborn is packed full of grisly images and effects, but its apparent attempts to be some kind of Jewish take on The Exorcist fail miserably.
The best that can be said for Goyer's latest is that it's competent. How competent is a matter of debate, as is the degree to which Goyer is self-aware about the film's camp value. [Blu-ray]
What The Unborn represents manages to be a thousand times more disturbing than anything Goyer captured with his pen or camera
There is a senseless scare every 5-7 minutes. Now, after one or two you start to get the giggles but after the third or fourth false scare you begin to Laugh Out Loud.
...boasts few attributes designed to initially capture the viewer's interest...
The Unborn is like a scary movie sentence without the necessary linking verbs. It's all genre gears and no motivational motor.
The Unborn is a story that should have remained untold and will be forgotten by the end of the weekend.
Full of cheap thrills that mostly consist of people popping up out of nowhere and dialogue comprised largely of theological gobbledygook.
Some of the ideas here may seem original, if questionable, but the treatment -- by writer-director David Goyer -- is strictly conventional, with the shock moments obviously inserted at regular intervals, usually while the heroine is in her underwear.
After a few initial decent scares, the corny dialogue, poor casting and cringe-worthy acting drag this movie into it’s own hell. Utter rubbish.
Cue a creepy toddler, various demonically possessed adults and a Jewish exorcism conducted by Gary Oldman. He’s a vastly better actor than the film deserves, but he can’t make the script seem even slightly better than it is.
The Unborn isn't the worst horror film you'll see in 2009, but the prospect of a sequel (which the film teases at the finale), is probably the biggest fright in the 88 minutes.
This may dabble in Jewish mysticism and the legacy of the Nazi era but scratch the surface and you discover just another standard scary movie.
Unsatisfying, hokey and never that scary (unless you’re the type who jumps at every loud noise or sudden appearance in this sort of movie), The Unborn outstays even its brief lifespan.
Packed with very scary moments and very disturbing images, this is not for the faint-hearted - that includes me.
The script tries hard to delve into the folklore of a dybbuk, and as it mixes this in with experiments on twins in concentration camps during WW2, the story becomes too convoluted for its own good.
Despite some gruesome special effects, the telling of this story is so prosaic and predictable that genuine thrills are in very short supply.
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January 09, 2009:
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