Unborn (Blu-ray) (2009)

"[Goyer] does make sure you're never far away from a big "Boo!"  Clark Collis, Entertainment Weekly
"What more could a horror fan ask for...  Jason Buchanan, TV Guide

Editor's Note A horror film combining ghostly children, Nazi experiments, and the Kabbalah, THE UNBORN also features a strong female heroine and plenty of surprisingly gruesome shocks. Writer-director David S. Goyer (BLADE: TRINITY) has seemingly taken inspiration from classics like ROSEMARY?S BABY (1968) and THE EXORCIST (1974), as well as the more recent THE EYE (2002), during the creation of this slick thriller featuring an attractive young cast and some disturbing effects work. College student Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman, CLOVERFIELD) begins having dreams about a spooky little boy with bright blue eyes. She thinks nothing of it as first, but when the image becomes a recurring motif and the boy she babysits for hits her in the face and tells her "Jumby wants to be born now," she begins to get frightened. After learning that she had a twin brother who died in utero, she finds a photo of her late mother with the same ghostly child looming in the background. A newspaper clipping then leads Casey to visit an elderly Holocaust survivor (Jane Alexander) in a nursing home. The woman clues her in to a dark family secret extending back to WWII, which prompts her to employ the services of Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman), whose skepticism about evil spirits is vanquished when he sees what he is up against. Goyer?s pacing is brisk, and the THE UNBORN?s jolts start right out of the gate. Yustman is an appealing lead, and the surprising presences of veterans Oldman and Alexander add some weight to the proceedings. The violence is never too graphic, but a few of the sequences are surprisingly icky, as are some of the supernatural beings that pop up. The result is a fun thriller that crams a lot of spookiness into its PG-13 rating.

	James Remar
	Gary Oldman
	Jane Alexander
	Odette Yustman
	Cam Gigandet
	Idris Elba
	Meagan Good
	Andrew Form - Producer
	Michael Bay - Producer
	James Hawkinson - Director of Photography
	David S. Goyer - Screenwriter
	Brad Fuller - Producer
	William S. Beasley - Executive Producer
	Jessika Borsiczky Goyer - Executive Producer
	Ramin Djawadi - Composer
	David S. Goyer - Director

Entertainment Weekly
"[THE UNBORN] comes across like a Jewish EXORCIST....[Director Goyer] does make sure you're never far away from a big 'Boo!'" -- Grade: B- 01/16/2009

Empire
3 stars out of 5 -- "[Goyer] manages to sustain an effective, doom-laden mood....Goyer also invests in a barrage of genuinely unsettling images..." 03/01/2009

A Nutshell Review 6 of 10
Written and directed by David S. Goyer, who is still in his infancy in being at the helm of feature films, but no stranger to writing screenplays from the horror genre to the reboot of the Batman franchise, you would have thought that he might have steered clear of the usual cliches that plague a horror film. Imagine that the following all made it to his film The Unborn - mirrors, demonic kids, setting in toilets, insects, darkened corridors, dogs, haunting nightmares, and of course, a pretty woman in the lead...I suspect that there probably was some unceremonious tinkering to the story, or in having some sections rearranged during post, which accounts for the rather choppy narrative. Some parts didn't gel too well, and stuck out like a sore thumb when you feel that it's chronologically messy. There were very little scary moments, to my surprise, though I had to admit there were some "instant" scare moments that genuinely made me (ahem, and the audience) jump at our seats. Credit too has to be given to the make up team, and the special effects crew for rigging some really insane visuals, though the spidery walking scene with heads upside down reminded me of The Exorcist...And if homage is Goyer's idea here, then there were additional attempts, and the one which made me burst our laughing, was the mention that holy books and instructional manuals on shooing the devil away, are only effective if the users truly have immense faith and belief in this sort of things. Fright Night was the film that said something similar to the effect that it stuck on me, and hearing something along the same lines just cracked me up...But a comedy this is not, just that it's quite economical in the way this is shot, relying on the usual build ups and the cliche springing of surprises when you (least) expected them to. If only the finale didn't degenerate into an all out, free for all action fest given the keen anticipation it had built up, nor if it had resembled Fallen too in a way of how the ghouls here are capable of travelling, this would probably have been a more than above average flick.