Paradoxically, the reason I love horror movies so much is because so damn many of them are so damn bad.
This doesn't make any sense to me. How hard can it be to tell a scary story? Once there was a young woman, and she died for no discernible reason. Yet in the race to the sucking line, the horror genre not only defeats its competition, but it also laps them and still has time to stop before the finish to sign the romantic comedy's chest. Word is that made the rom-com so happy he couldn't sleep for three days.
The obvious cure for his insomnia would have been to actually attend a horror movie. The first pharmaceutical company to convert personality-free characters and nonsensical movie hoodoo into pill form is going to make a killing. Not just for the narcotic benefits, but because horror movies are strangely addicting: wading through that much sewage makes finding the good ones all the more rewarding.
The Unborn is not one of the good things you find at the bottom of the sewage pile. Odette Yustman has entered a strange time in her life: the kids she's babysitting are giving her cryptic messages. She's seeing and hearing things in her mirror. Also, she keeps finding jerusalem crickets where they have no business being, like inside uncooked eggs.
This all begins to make slightly more sense once Yustman discovers she had a twin who died in utero. After a few more supernatural encounters and some chats with a kindly old Holocaust survivor, she reaches the obvious conclusion: she's being haunted by her dead twin, and the only way to put a stop to it is with a bitching exorcism.
It's generally a bad sign when a scary movie provokes unintended laughter. Bummer for The Unborn, then; the audience was giggling from the very first scene of a boy-faced dog menacing Yustman on a jogging trail.
Things never picked up from there, largely because so many of the eerie things going on made no goddamn sense. Despite the fact day-to-day life rarely involves getting murdered by ghosts or eaten by monsters, we're willing to suspend our disbelief in these things so long as the world they inhabit follows its own rules. The thinking behind The Unborn's rules seems to be "Hey, you know what's creepy? Jerusalem crickets. Especially on a gigantic screen. Let's flood that thing. No, I don't know how he does it, what am I, Kit Marlowe? Just get me more crickets!"
Disturbing images can't take the place of a logical story. It's not scary, it's frustrating.
Other things that aren't scary: cheap shocks. A sudden scream might make you jump -- that is, if you're a big wuss, you big fat wuss -- but it doesn't provide any lasting dread. It doesn't build up to any ongoing terror. It's just a momentary jolt, gone as quickly as the next cut. It's also one of the biggest arrows in writer/director David S. Goyer's quiver.
If arbitrary ghost-powers and loads of "BOO!"-moments aren't enough to bore you, The Unborn helpfully provides a cast of persistently dull characters. Its leads are the equivalent of styrofoam cake: they look good but taste bland (metaphorically speaking--theater technology isn't that advanced yet, praise God) and if you eat too much of them, you'd probably spend the next day blasting debris out your orifices.
A dumb story turns into dumb fun once rabbi Gary Oldman and priest Idris Elba decide to help Yustman drive out her demonic spirit. (Technically she's being haunted by a dybbuk, which is Hebrew for "stupid.") The ensuing oversized mayhem stands as a lesson to us all: if you can't be good, be really, really big.
Oh, I forgot that Yustman spends a lot of the movie padding around in her underwear, so it's not all bad. Combine those parts with the exorcism, and you're looking at 15+ minutes of fine cinema. Wait, The Unborn is 87 minutes long? Well, shoot. Maybe the next one will be better.
Grade: D+