The Unborn: Critic Reviews

Goyer has penned many scripts superior to this one, but he does make sure you're never far away from a big 'Boo!'

The film teeters so perilously and routinely at the edge of camp, both with some of its casting choices and some unfortunate dialogue...that it's hard to know if Mr. Goyer wants to make us howl with fear or laughter.

A scary movie so fantastically stupid and crass it made my skull contract and my sinuses harden to the consistency of pipe-cleaners.

A laughably bad horror flick involving demonic possession, concentration camps and torturous genetic experiments.

The Unborn is one of those movies evidently conceived by digging a Dungeons & Dragons Fiend Folio out of storage to find, resurrect, and rebrand some long-forgotten bugaboo.

At least writer/director David S. Goyer had the sense to boost these generic proceedings with pros like Alexander, Oldman, Elba and Carla Gugino, who plays Casey's mother in a series of embarrassing flashbacks.

Filmed in Chicago but universal in its lameness...The Unborn is the story of a dybbuk who makes trouble for the skinny North Shore college girl played by Odette Yustman, who's always out jogging when she should be considering a sandwich.

[An] exuberantly creepy mash-up of Jewish folklore, J-horror atmospherics, and demonic possession boilerplate.

Before long, the connective tissue between scares starts to call attention to its own preposterousness.

The Unborn is a baby-sitter horror flick (it's for and about them) with classic creep-out elements that unite in a surprisingly engrossing story.

The movie's not very good, but there are ideas, good and bad, in its execution that are worth mulling over.

This is where many a horror movie falls and never again rises: too much exposition.

Laughable horror flick made from an unstable solution of Jewish mysticism, Nazi evil and an otherworldly demon.

Well, there are some effective scares here, and you'll laugh at yourself afterward just for jumping and squealing like a little girl. But other images and pieces of dialogue are just as hilarious -- and that probably wasn't their intention.

Smoking-hot heroine. Clever paranormal premise. Painfully clueless conclusion.

The Unborn is packed full of grisly images and effects, but its apparent attempts to be some kind of Jewish take on The Exorcist fail miserably.

The best that can be said for Goyer's latest is that it's competent. How competent is a matter of debate, as is the degree to which Goyer is self-aware about the film's camp value. [Blu-ray]

Should have been aborted.

What The Unborn represents manages to be a thousand times more disturbing than anything Goyer captured with his pen or camera

There is a senseless scare every 5-7 minutes. Now, after one or two you start to get the giggles but after the third or fourth false scare you begin to Laugh Out Loud.

...boasts few attributes designed to initially capture the viewer's interest...

The Unborn is like a scary movie sentence without the necessary linking verbs. It's all genre gears and no motivational motor.

The Unborn is a story that should have remained untold and will be forgotten by the end of the weekend.

'Tis the season of the Hollywood dumps -- which is too bad because I had harbored some small hope for this latest horror offering from David S. Goyer.