The Unborn is actually a teen slasher pic masquerading as a horror film. Oh, they have given it a throwaway The Exorcist-adjacent storyline. They have puffed it up with a couple of real actors: Gary Oldman as a stalwart Rabbi and Jane Alexander as a grandmother with a funny accent. And they have even tossed in a few The Ring-like images; forlorn but menacing little boys, grainy black and white video. But deep down it is all about panty shots and brainless suspense. Odette Yustman, the young model-actress from Cloverfield, is something of a yeoman. She may not be better than the material - like Oldman and Alexander, who must have been promised small (but not nearly large enough) fortunes to have their names associated with offal like this. But she is at least equal to it - for whatever that’s worth.

            The script, by Director David S. Goyer no less, the man who wrote the magnificent Dark City, might as well have been in another language for all that it advanced the story. Indeed, had the film had been shot in – say – German, and all of us forced to watch it without subtitles, we could at least console ourselves with the illusion that what the characters were saying in their home language had to make sense out of the shocking idiocy we were witnessing on screen. For example, the token black friend’s lines are so wildly inconsistent they actually elicit hoots of derision from the audience. How Goyer allowed this garbage to actually get produced is a mystery of far greater moment than how twins might be “doorways to supernatural places.”

            The plot, and – please understand – the term is used in its broadest, most forgiving sense, involves Nazi death camp experimentation, lost winter gloves, slow motion jogging, an upside-down bulldog, dybbuks (Jewish ghosts), maternal madness, mirrors, stillborn brothers, wind chimes, demonic possession, and that hoary, last-refuge-of-a-coward final act device, yes, unrestricted host-jumping. If that sounds promising to you, have at it. But act fast: this loser will be out of the theaters in less time than it takes the spirit of a tormented twin brother to leap from a dramatically hairless Episcopal minister to a fashionably unshaven boyfriend.

Phantom Four
U.S. Release Date: January 9, 2009
Director: David S. Goyer
Screen writer: David S. Goyer
Running Time: 87 minutes