You know a horror movie's bad when, during the first "scary scene", the entire audience bursts out laughing rather than screaming out in horror. And you know you're really doomed when the entire audience commences gleefully tearing the movie apart, rather than bickering over who's talking during what scene, and the usual onslaught of "shhh's!"
The opening scene of The Unborn was, apparently, supposed to be a scary, ominous scene that set the tone for the rest of the movie. Instead, there was some mess of a small, ugly boy (enough with the spooky children, Hollywood!), an aqua glove, a bulldog wearing a mask (?) and a buried fetus in a jar. I guess now we all know where babies come from, at any rate.
So we have our 'heroine' (who I find debatable at best), the supposed-to-be-attractive Odette Yustman (of Cloverfield 'fame') who somehow manages to look sickly thin and awkwardly acne-scar-marked in just about every frame. She spends most of the movie changing eye colors, jogging in the frigid cold of a Chicago fall/winter (it would seem that the seasons regularly rocket back and forth, with no sign of a spring or summer to be found), and running from some combination of the creepy young boy she babysits for, and some kind of Jewish demon which Gary Oldman (someone owed someone a favor!), as Rabbi Sendack, describes as a dybbuk. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
Yustman's acting is deplorable, and we never once feel anything even close to pity or worry for her. In fact, within the first ten minutes, we were all hoping she'd just hurry up and die already. I think at this point, I'd rather watch a movie based solely on Jumby.
Oh, wait, a Jumby? you ask? Let me explain. Apparently Yustman's character - Casey - was born a twin, but managed to strangle her fetus brother to death with her own umbilical cord. Considering they were little more than a clump of cells at the time, and there's no way in hell Casey had the brain power, muscle power, or, you know, body, to really plot and carry out a murder, she decides that she's to blame, and runs around screaming about her brother this, and her brother that, and in the end, it's no surprise that that her father (James Remar, the first of two Dexter actors that unwisely agreed to appear in this film) conveniently goes on a business trip and disappears after the first 15 minutes of the movie. I wouldn't be able to deal with that much unncessary whining either. Anyway, "Jumby" is the nickname her parents gave the boy fetus in the womb. Because there's nothing more frightening than a Jumby, especially during the laughable lecture hall scene, in which Casey sees Jumby wants to be born written on the whiteboard, and then realizes she's filled her page of notes with the same words. It's Jumby time! If only it didn't sound so much like a combination of Gumby and Jumbo shrimp. Kind of makes me hungry.
So poor Casey's mother went insane and ended up hanging herself (so that's why her father skipped town!) and it was all very tragic, and apparently her insane asylum was in a castle or something, and her mother had wonky eye issues with her brown eyes changing to a blue color only found in a Special Edition box of Crayolas, and oh, did I mention that this is all because of the Holocaust?
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Casey fleetingly mentions something about her mother having been adopted but never having known her birth parents, and then conveniently Casey finds some clippings from her mother's collection that talk about a Holocaust survivor named Sofi. So, of course, Sofi ends up being her biological grandmother, and a mini reunion ensues. But wait! Our Sofi was, of course, a twin! But then that wacky Josef Mengele got his hands on the twins, and in a lovely, souless exploitation of the horrors of the Holocaust, had the pleasure of injecting that Crayola blue into Sofi's twin's eyes, and then oops killed him, and then oops opened a door to another universe that let in the demon and so on and so forth.
Now, as a Jew myself, I'm not prone to being overly touchy. But once in awhile, someone pulls something like this, and I find myself becoming very offended, and my hands itch to throttle someone. You do not pull the Holocaust into a shitty horror movie because you think it'll add some weight to the film and make it more plausible. The entire thing was so groan inducing that even the pre-teens around us were uncomfortable and asking whether or not writer/director David S. Goyer had lost his freaking mind. Although I'm still more offended that they thought something called Jumby was going to frighten us, and that something like this picture would actually strike fear into the hearts of the moviegoers. Word to the wise, Goyer, we've seen this done a million times.
Know what else we've also seen a million times? Someone all contorted and spider-like crawling up or down stairs (The Grudge), someone making that weird comb/gurgling noise (The Grudge), head spinning (The Exorcist), old people (Grumpy Old Men), creepy children (The Ring, Hide and Seek, The Sixth Sense, The Shining, The Omen, The Others, Village of the Damned, The Exorcist, Silent Hill, etc etc etc.) , too-skinny heroines (Cloverfield, The Eye, anything with any Hollywood starlet in it), exorcisms (The Exorcist, The Exorcism of Emily Rose) a nonsensical plot (most recent horror movies) and so on and so forth. In fact, everything's been done so many times that the entire movie is one, big, stinking cliche. There's no level of imagination, no creativity, no thought put into this whatsoever. They figured a few cheap scares, some faces popping out of darkened rooms, and the whole Holocaust debacle would be enough to carry the movie. Sorry, kids, but you failed. Miserably.
Oh, and Jumby's born after all, because of course Casey is pregnant, and of course she's having twins. Oops, did I ruin the end for you? Good.
Afterwards, Jen and I decided that Jumby was going to be our new catch phrase, because we thought we had to take something away from the movie (other than a bad taste in our mouths, and the annoyance that we'd actually shelled out $10 each to see it.) I guess you could say this movie was one hell of a Jumby.
