The Unborn (movie review)

I had been looking forward to this movie for a few months & at the time the buzz was pretty good, even the trailer looked promising but having watched it I have to say it really didn’t live up to the expectations at all. I think the main problem is that instead of taking a fresh approach to the horror genre it relied too much on “Ring” type scares with a dash of “The Exorcist” thrown in.. not that those films are bad to start with but I have seen those scares before & indeed so have many movie fans.

So the story goes like this:
Casey played by Odette yustman has a series of bad dreams which feature a dog with an upside down head (seriously) & a spooky looking ghost boy. As the story progresses we learnt that young casey is cursed & this particular curse reaches far back into her families history. It turns out that caseys mother committed suicide & her unborn brother is actually a Jewish demon (very omen like) this particular Jewish demon was born in Nazi Germany through a series of experiments & such, the demon can jump from one body to the next (like the movie Fallen) but it seems to stay most of the time in a creepy looking boy, purely for shock I bet. Apparently a gate has opened from one world to the next & in order to close it casey must undergo an exorcism (the exorcism scene has a few predictable scares) other than that the film didn’t contain enough good scares & the story was rather ..bad, at one point the demon uses the body of an old man to attack its victim & you might think the old man bent up like a spider is a fresh scare but no its been done before - in a deleted scene of the original exorcist the filmmakers had an identical scene with an identical spider walk gimmick.. Did the unborn guys see this & think no one would notice, either way it was too little too late. The acting is surprisingly good with a good performance from all the cast but the story falls apart too soon & scares just don’t live up to the hype, the chances are if you have seen the trailer then you have seen all the scary bits already. I really wanted to like this film but alas its below average & too predictable.