I went into this movie not expecting a whole lot, and I left with even less. Director David S. Goyer makes a pretty unoriginal and non-terrifying horror movie with The Unborn.

The movie stars Odette Yustman (Cloverfield) as Casey, a young girl who is starting to see a scary looking boy everywhere she goes. The boy turns out to be her twin who died in the womb before they were born and now he wants to be born. The boy, who goes by the name Jumby, looks uninteresting and not scary for the entire movie. Casey gets some advice from her friend Romy, Meagan Good, and boyfriend Mark, Cam Gigandet from Twilight. So Casey goes to visit Sofi, an older woman living in a retirement home, to find out the story behind the whole twin thing. What she says isn’t even worth mentioning. She does tell her what to look out for to know that the spirit of the twin is coming, bells ringing and wind chimes. Eventually, Casey goes to Rabbi Sendak, Gary Oldman, and they decide to have an exorcism to get rid of the evil spirit. Rabbi Sendak recruits Arthur Wyndam, Idris Elba from The Wire, and a few others to help out with the exorcism before eventually, all hell breaks loose.

The movie goes for plenty of cheap scares and only succeeds with maybe one or two of them. Thankfully the movie is less than an hour and a half because having to sit through anymore of this would have not been the best. The only saving graces are Gary Oldman and Idris Elba. While not in the movie for very long Elba has a decent two scenes before turning into some kind of monster (not a spoiler, in the trailer). And Oldman plays his rabbi part pretty well. All the other performances are quite weak and non memorable.

Overall I thought this movie was just terrible. Not scary, not thrilling, and not anything that makes for a good horror movie. I’d recommend staying away from this one unless you really like cheap, non scary horror movies. If that’s the case then give this one a shot.

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