Perhaps unhappy that Catholics get all the credit for exorcism in movies, David Goyer thought about a demon story inspired from the Jewish folklore, the Kabbalah and, gulp, the memory of Auschwitz. The result turned out to be an occasionally effective, mostly dumb but generally passable horror flick called “The Unborn,” though expected to be funny to some extent or at least deeply offensive.
The movie gathers influences from so many other movies such as "The Exorcist," "The Ring," "The Mephisto Waltz," "The X-Files" and even "Poltergeist, that almost makes your head spin.
Hot college babe Casey ("Cloverfield" star Odette Yustman) spends most of the movie fighting off an evil spirit but the first half-hour of the film finds her troubled by a succession of freaky dreams, either with potato bugs or of a creepy little kid with a really bad haircut for whom Casey baby-sits and who seems to be somehow related to her dead mother. He makes cryptic, usually nonsensical, but always sinister pronouncements like "Jumby wants to be born . . . now." The scenes also involve oddly colored eyes, missing blue mittens and a couple of suicides.
It turns out that poor Casey is a twin, a condition that, for generational reasons, has attracted a dybbuk, which in Jewish mythology is the demonic spirit of a dead person that takes possession of the living. The malicious spirit is connected to her twin brother who died in utero and apparently, it can only be rooted out with the help of a Holocaust survivor (Jane Alexander, with numbers inked on her arm) and an exorcism performed by a rabbi (Gary Oldman).
At first the young student thinks she might be going crazy but finally manages to persuade her best friend and boyfriend to help her find the truth about her past. The problem seems to be generated by "genetic mosaicism" as Sofi, Casey’s grandmother, explains. She tells the girl a story about some Nazi genetic experimentation from back when she and her own twin brother were in Auschwitz as children. It was then when she first encountered the satanic spirit as it entered her brother's body. She claims to have slain the devil but apparently unable to find anything better to do, it has returned and it has been haunting the family ever since. Characters appear and disappear and there seems to be absolutely no logic to the horror.
Actually, the religious angle in this movie is a little bit different of that we are used to. Instead of having the Catholic Church handle the exorcism parts whose priests are experts in, “The Unborn” deals with this matter from a Judaic point of view. Gary Oldman plays a rabbi to whom Casey goes to perform an exorcism. She begs him to translate a massive Hebrew tome.
A crew of 19 special effects members does exemplary work by using subtle distortions in Casey’s visions and a various monster effects involving big, amber-colored potato bugs, also known as Jerusalem crickets, scuttling toward Casey and her wide-open, yowling mouth, not to mention the weird, twisted-headed dog.
“The Unborn,” turned out to be a laughably bad horror flick casting great names though, who most likely, at some point, may realize that this movie will haunt their resumes forever. And there is no spiritual incantation whatsoever to clear it.
