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My grandmother always used to say: “be careful what you wish for.” After constantly railing against the recent onslaught of horror remakes, reboots and rehashes, I thought my wish might have finally been granted with the release of a “new” horror film. While I admire writer/director David S. Goyer (co-writer of The Dark Knight) for at least attempting to create something original, in the end The Unborn is anything but. This movie reminded of the opening sequence of Robert Altman’s The Player, wherein various people — including the great Buck Henry — put in their pitches for new movie projects. I can imagine Goyer having a similar meeting inside the offices of producer Michael Bay (which should have raised a red flag as to the quality of this latest venture). “Yeah, it’s sort of a Jewish version of The Exorcist meets The Omen, with a spooky little kid dressed like the cretins from Children of the Corn.” Now most producers would probably politely pass on such a project … but not Michael Bay! “Bring it on,” I can imagine the uber-producer saying, adding one caveat: “Can you just cast a super-hottie like Megan Fox in the lead?” Since Fox was busy shooting Bay’s own Transformers sequel at the time, Goyer obliged by hiring the next best thing: a Fox lookalike named Odette Yustman, who conveniently spends the bulk of the movie prancing around in a tight undershirt and panties.

One of the greatest sins a writer could commit in my old college fiction class was ending a story with a dream sequence. “And then I woke up” is a crutch for the lazy, my professor would argue. I might also contend that opening a film with a dream sequence is equally uninspired. Nevertheless, when we first meet Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman), she’s jogging along a country road and becomes inexplicably drawn to a lone glove lying in her path. As she bends down to pick it up, she notices an odd-looking little boy stoically staring at her — on his hand is a matching glove. But before she can return it to him, he turns into a dog wearing a mask that runs off into the woods. After following the dog-boy, Casey finds the discarded mask and something buried beneath it — what appears to be a baby fetus under glass. After a well-timed beat, the fetus’ eyes pop open accompanied by a musical sting on the soundtrack to enhance the jump factor. We soon learn this is just another in a series of recurring dreams that have plagued Casey of late. But soon elements of her dreams begin popping up in real life. As she’s babysitting a neighbor’s children one night, she finds the little boy urging its younger sibling to gaze into a mirror. When she tells the boy to stop, he hits her in the face with the mirror and announces: “Jumby wants to be born now.” Later that evening, she sees the same lone glove from her dream lying in the street outside the house.

After a few more weird things happen the next day at school, Casey’s friend Romy (Meagan Good) informs her that one of her eyes is changing color. Fearing getting slapped upside the head with a mirror may have caused irreparable damage, she goes to see an eye doctor, who informs her that the change in iris color is not due to any sudden trauma, but rather is a genetic trait most commonly associated with twins. Claiming to be an only child, Casey goes to question her father (James Remar) about it. He reluctantly reveals that she did, in fact, have a twin brother who died in her mother’s womb — he was strangled by Casey’s umbilical cord in utero. Oh, and his nickname was “Jumby.” Casey slowly starts to piece things together and through flashbacks it is revealed that her mother (Carla Gugino) committed suicide while in a mental institution. Casey starts thinking her mother killed herself because she lost the baby and that she may have also blamed her for causing his death. She also begins to suspect the phantom boy from her dreams — who now begins appearing on street corners, in mirror reflections, and in one absurd instance, inside her bathroom medicine cabinet — is the ghost of her dead brother. But when she finds a photograph of a woman with the same boy among some newspaper clippings kept by her mother that predate her own birth, she realizes he can’t be her brother. Casey decides to seek out the mysterious woman, Sofi Kozma (Jane Alexander), for some answers.

Although initially uncooperative, Casey eventually learns that Sofi is actually her grandmother, who is also an Auschwitz survivor, and she and her own twin brother were subjected to horrible experiments at the hands of the Nazis while interred at the concentration camp. The Nazis believed genetic secrets were to be had from studying twins, and they conducted cruel and painful procedures on the young siblings. Sofi’s brother died as a result, but he came back as something called a dybbuk — a demonic spirit that possesses and takes over the bodies of human beings as a means of crossing over from the netherworld, or something like that. Sofi ended up killing her brother to release him from the dybbuk and the evil entity has since haunted her entire family, seeking revenge against her. It was the dybbuk — in the form of Sofi’s possessed brother — that was responsible for killing Casey’s brother while still in the womb, for driving her mother to suicide, and is now intent on getting Casey. When Casey presses her grandmother for help, she suggests she seek the aid of Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman) to perform a Jewish exorcism of the evil spirit. But when Casey initially goes to see Rabbi Sendak, he’s dismissive of her and her request for an exorcism. It isn’t until he starts seeing some of the same twisted visions — like dogs with upside down heads (!) — that he relents and agrees to help her. Go figure.

The movie builds to the inevitable and clichéd big exorcism showdown of man vs. demon that heavily borrows from previous and far better movies like The Exorcist and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Rabbi Sendak brings in a support staff of no less than ten people to assist in the religious ceremony — all of which ultimately end up possessed and/or dead by the end of the grueling ordeal. Suffice to say that the exorcism succeeds and Casey is at least momentarily freed from her family’s curse, but this being a horror movie Goyer can’t resist one last ludicrous twist in which Casey learns something that might serve as a catalyst to bring back the dybbuk’s vengeful spirit. The plot of The Unborn is so plodding and contrived, it’s difficult not to see things coming from a mile away and the characters are all dumber than dirt when it comes to making common-sense decisions. The usually-great Gary Oldman is really slumming it here as a skeptical and rather callous rabbi, while the miscast Jane Alexander affects a horrible Jewish accent that sounds like the setup for a bad ethnic joke. Goyer also sets up situations and characters that lead nowhere or are dropped without explanation — Casey’s father is introduced and shown first at home with his daughter, then at the office, then disappears from movie altogether. And while I have to admit that Odette Yustman certainly provides plenty of eye-candy, I don’t see any Academy Awards in her future based on this reactionary performance. Even just shy of 90 minutes, after watching The Unborn I wish the whole thing had been a dream. At least then I would have the option of waking up.

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