Sports and Entertainment

First of all, my biggest gripe with “horror” movies nowadays is that 99 percent of them are rated PG-13.  A horror movie by definition needs to have three things.  Death and lots of it — Blood, to accompany said death — and beautiful women screaming.  The problem with a PG-13 movie is that you can’t really show the death on screen.  Most of it is off screen.  A screaming girl followed by a cut scene, followed by a knife quickly dropping down to said girl’s head, followed by a cut scene, followed by the audience’s interpretation on what happened.  With a R rated horror movie, you don’t have to have those audience interpretations, you can show the bloody end to said damsel in distress.  Plus, you can swear.  If a hockey-masked serial killer is chasing after me, I am not saying, “Oh crap”.  I am saying a hell of a lot of dirtier words….which to me, adds to the realism.

The Unborn is  a movie about this woman named Casey (the absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous Odette Yustman who you will remember from Cloverfield) who starts having these crazy dreams.  Now, when I say crazy dreams, I mean wacked out not even meth heads have these kinds of dreams.  Running through the woods jamming out to your iPod only to find a living breathing fetus under some leaves types of dreams. 

(Odette Yustman)

So because she is such a wacked out person, she decides to make her profession as a babysitter.  The parents should have done a background check I know.  Anyway, the kid she babysits just so happens to be the kid from every creepy Children of the Corn movie (how the hell doesn’t this kid age?).  The kid tells her, “Jumby wants to be born now,” and she goes on this mission to find out what the hell that means. 

That mission takes her all over the great state of Illinois and into what I like to the underbelly scene of Jewish-Chicagoans.  Cliched abandoned insane asylums, out of place ancient castles in Illinois abound… (Whispering glory holes?  WTF Jews?) There is some absurd often long exposition that goes in every direction from crazy mad scientist Nazis to wacked out moms who kill themselves.  (The brilliant David Goyer from Batman Begins and The Dark Knight wrote this….and must have had a bad day at the trusty typewriter)   Unable to understand what the hell she is doing, she turns to Commissioner Gordon from Batman for help.  For some strange reason, Commissioner Gordon is a Rabbi that digs Madonna’s religion now. (Cabela’s?  I think that is an awesome camping store…but people must really dig it to worship it. Who would have thunk it?)  She finds out that she was a twin and her brother died in the womb who wants to find a human host.  Now, Commissioner Gordon must perform an exorcism.

So really, I guess you could call this movie The Jewish Exorcist instead of The Unborn…but we won’t go there.  Gary Oldman (I will stop calling him Commissioner Gordon now) does a good job in this movie like he does in everything else he has been in.  The little creepy kid is actually pretty disturbing because little kids freak me out, but that is just me… The real star of The Unborn is Odette Yustman.  When it comes to Yustman, the movie caters to the 15-19 teenage boy demographic by finding excuse after excuse to get her in a shower or in her undies.  (Hence the poster below).  While she really has a tough time “acting” she does a great job looking good.

The Unborn really tries to be scary, and sometimes succeeds with its weird upside down person and dog imagery, but ultimately it falls in line with other PG-13 horror movies:  Lacking the balls it takes to frighten an adult audience.  While I hate to give a ”Throw it out” to a Gary Oldman/David Goyer flick, I must say that I have a feeling the Unrated DVD will be much better, and to wait for that.   

Trackback URI | Comments RSS