REVIEW: Season of the Witch (2011)

“Hey, I just got inspired to make a movie!”

“How did that happen?”

“I went to a Renaissance fair, got drunk off my ass and then vomited it all up outside while a bunch of lecherous hobos watched!”

“…how would that inspire you to create anything?”

“Well…”

Director: Dominic Sena

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman

IMDb

(This review co-written with my friend, Michelle Lewis.)

Yes, Season of the Witch. In honor of this month being the four-year anniversary of this blog, I was contemplating what to do in celebration. To do so, I had to take into account a couple of things – all sorts of very technical elements such as, what would yield the funniest jokes? What would be something that would catch peoples’ eyes?

Then I decided to just be lazy, and throw all of that in the garbage and review the one movie that has both Nicolas Cage AND Ron Perlman at the same time – this one. How much balls do you have to have to put those two guys in a movie together? The universe might as well explode. Oh boy; I just can’t wait to see what kinds of shenanigans this movie has put together to exploit the (perhaps, sometimes unintentional) comedic talents of these two men. Let’s get started.

We start off with this subtitle informing us that the makers of the movie went back to 1235 A.D. to the City of Villach to shoot the first scene. That’s some dedication right there!

Then we get the greatest period of feminism ever – when women got accused of being witches for basically no reason at all and then got hauled into the river by an angry mob. We see exactly how fair this is when you have two normal looking girls pleading for their lives on one end and then this old crone with a glass eye damning everyone to hell.

Now, now, she might not be a witch. Don't discriminate! She just looks, acts, talks and probably smells like one, but still. We live in a PC world, goddammit! RIGHTS FOR THE WITCHES!

Kind of poisoning the well there! I mean, you could make a forty year old balding male accountant look like a witch just by putting him NEXT to that lady! It’s like showing a crime scene lineup full of regular guys except for the one known serial killer who admitted to murdering seven people in cold blood for no reason. Doesn’t exactly do wonders for the public confidence in everyone in the vicinity.

But enough of that. We have some fun crusades with Nic Cage and Ron Perlman to sit through! In case you didn’t know, medieval crusaders in the days of the black plague often made wisecracks about buying each other drinks after the battle ended, showing no fear or regard for the terrible casualties about to ensue. I’d say this is just how guys act, but really it just comes off like both of them are huge jackasses. Or rather, the writers were being huge jackasses, because this is about as historically accurate as The Washingtonians. At least that movie had cannibalistic George Washington imitators. This movie has, what, shitty special effects and costumes borrowed from the retirement home production of The Seventh Seal? Please.

"Hey, do you think this is rock bottom yet?"
"Nah, I was in The Last Winter a few years ago."

So they go through God knows how many battles (quite literally) until this one time when Cage accidentally stabs an innocent woman. This prompts them to question their religion and what they’re fighting for, going off on their super holistic leader guy about how hypocritical it is to kill in God’s name.

Uh, yeah…nice sentiment, guys, but there’s one little problem. Pardon me if I’m stepping on the toes of the battle-weary when I say this, but, WHERE THE FUCK WAS THIS WHEN YOU WERE STABBING AND MURDERING HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE IN THE PREVIOUS BATTLES? So what, you can ram your sword through droves of other guys, but when ONE WOMAN accidentally steps in front of your sword, THAT’S when you suddenly cry bullshit? I’m sorry, that’s just too stupid to let pass.

"Hey, it's okay. I punched a bunch of women in one of my other recent movies! And then I was dressed as a bear for some reason! Ha ha ha...what I'm saying is, don't hold it against me."

I mean, yeah, I get it – they’re starting to become disillusioned with the crusades and whatnot. That’s fine. But the way this movie is handling that very delicate subject matter is just off. We see them fighting battles without protest throughout over three years’ time, and then suddenly they’re against it because one innocent person died? Not that they’re wrong to be upset about that, but it’s just poor writing. Maybe if we had gotten more dialogue and seen them slowly changing their minds, it would have worked – but I guess a 90 minute movie just has no space for petty things like character development, right? Pfft, who needs it?

So Perlman and Cage say they’re leaving. The higher-up general guy threatens to stop them, and I imagine there’s probably some sort of rule in their military about deserting, but the whole army just sits there and watches them go, not bothering to follow them, restrain them or anything. Best army ever? I think it is.

Perlman and Cage go wandering through the world with no clear motive or destination in mind. They eventually come across a city where the black plague has taken effect, rendering everyone into extremely expensive Halloween store makeup. I mean, this stuff must have been at least $30 to buy, and for multiple people? Totally cleared out the director’s rich girlfriend’s parent’s credit card. They get exposition from some random guy about the plague and then end up getting arrested.

So after talking to the world’s oldest haunted house prop...

That's Christopher Lee, so the "oldest haunted house prop" bit isn't entirely farcicial.

...and declaring that they no longer follow the Church, they get thrown in jail for about five seconds before getting charged with the task of hauling some girl to some other town where she’ll apparently be tried for the charge of witchcraft in bringing the plague to the town. Perlman cracks some jokes about how mortified the priest looked when Cage said he didn’t believe in the church – yeah, scenes like this really make me so invested in the drama going on. I bet The Seventh Seal’s dramatic moments would have been way better if the characters were cracking unfunny jokes throughout all of them, right?

So then they start their journey. They need a guide though, and so they of course make the most logical choice – some guy who’s been arrested and put in one of those head-lock things for fraud. Isn’t that what most sensible people would do? I know I would. It’s just like the time I was searching for a navigator for my pirate ship and then decided on a blind guy. Best choice I ever made!

Yup, nobody else they could have chosen...it had to be this guy. Instead of just spending an extra five minutes asking door-to-door, they had to pick the guy locked up for criminal activity - genius.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about the stupidly stupid adventures of Cage, Perlman, two priests with sticks up their asses, generic criminal guy with no personality and helpless girl in a cage. My what a jolly motley crew they make! It’s about as fun as going to a funeral.

We get tons of scenes of them just wandering around in the woods. Sometimes there are attempts made at drama between the characters, but they fall about as flat as the North Dakota plainslands. Mostly this is because the writers clearly just didn’t give a shit – every choice they make comes off as goofy, but you can tell they’re pretty much deadpan serious about all of it. There’s really no sense of fun or self-awareness with these scenes, both of which might have helped the film. Nobody likes a silly movie trying to be serious.

The thing is, most of these scenes just have no purpose. Like really – what relevance does the scene where they meet that altar boy have?

Look at that face. That is the face all young men have when staring down Ron Perlman.

Yeah, so they come across this altar boy with a sword who wants to join their team mostly because the script says so – Lord knows I’d have second thoughts about forming an alliance with Ron Perlman and Nicolas Cage, but I guess back in the days of the plague they didn’t have the Internet to know who these two guys are. We get a drawn out sword fight between Perlman and the kid, which pretty much just leads up to the kid joining their party anyway. I guess the swordfight isn’t too bad or anything, but c’mon, why even bother? Don’t they have a job to do? Why waste time with this?

How about another scene later where they have to push their cart across a rickety old bridge? Cage girl offers her help and says the whole thing would be lighter if they let her out – how? It’s a giant wooden piece of shit! You probably weigh like 90 pounds! They don’t let her out and spend a lot of time nearly getting killed on the bridge. You may be asking why they don’t even attempt to find some other way around. Well, the answer to that is simple – they don’t have time. They do have time for pointless sword fights, but not for trying to find alternatives to plunging to a certain death. Priorities: they’re not just for the sane anymore!

So they get across the bridge finally. We get an overly long scene where the girl escapes from her cage and runs away, only for one of the two priest guys to get killed off in a cave by accidentally running into the altar boy’s sword. He doesn’t seem to see the altar boy at all, instead seeing a woman in front of him instead. Which seems strange enough for Cage to start wearing an expression on his face that’s supposed to be either contemplative or constipated. I can’t really tell.

Let's just compromise and say 'confused.'

In between all of these scenes we get some of them all sitting around at night. They talk about how wrong it is to believe that the girl is a witch and how close-minded the church can be. It’s interesting to hear this kind of dialogue, and it could potentially have some relevance and make the film more substantial. However, all of this will become entirely moot by the film’s ludicrous conclusion. I won’t spoil it yet, but trust me on that.

In the meantime, we get scenes like this, where a bunch of werewolves tear that criminal guy apart in the woods:

And I don’t mean werewolves like the normal sense; no…I mean literal werewolves. Wolves that change into, well, more demonic wolves. Isn’t that kind of weird? Why not just have regular demonic wolves? Is there a point to them changing their already scary wolf-faces into even scarier, deader looking wolf-faces? I dunno. I guess I just don’t have the necessary genius to understand the clearly brilliant mythology of this world. Is it a straight historical crusades story? Is it a supernatural tale of witchcraft? Who knows?! Not even the movie, apparently.

It may seem like I’m just complaining about nothing here. That is because the movie is incredibly fucking boring. It’s about as interesting as watching a monkey pick its nose.

So, sigh, I guess they get to wherever they were going, some church or something. They go in and find a bunch of priests who thought it would be an awesome idea to get the black plague. Guess you didn’t pray hard enough, guys!

Well, to be fair, they didn't catch his good side with this picture.

After some more bullshit exposition, they realize the girl tricked them into coming because she wanted to go to the church all along. Why? Well, because for some reason the church is the only place she has the power to turn into one of the worst special effects you’ll ever see:

Seriously, look at that shit. That was the best you could do? Movies from 30 years ago had better effects than that! It’s hideous looking! Using that kind of CGI is tantamount to just admitting you have nothing worthwhile to contribute creatively. Did the special effects guys just think it would be funny to fuck with the movie? I mean, I get it; Lord knows I’d be bored enough too if I had to sit and watch this crap for that long just to edit in the effects. But the least they could have done was go all the way with it. Why not just put this in the movie and really screw with it?

So they have some big, stupid Hollywood style battle and Nic Cage and Ron Perlman both die. We get a partial ass shot of the now-cured girl and then a phoned-in monologue about how she and the altar boy will remember Cage and Perlman forever.

It’s all just so contrived. Why bother having all that bullshit about doubting the church and the accusations of witchcraft if you were just going to end with a big goofy monster fight at the end? While they potentially had some interesting cultural and religious subtext with the talk about how hypocritical and fear-mongering the church was, ALL OF THAT is ruined when they just throw in the vomited-up spawn of mid-90s dollar-store computer-game Satan at the end. How are we supposed to take this seriously at all with that in the film? It’d be like making a provocative film about the Great Depression only to reveal at the end that, in the movie’s universe, the Great Depression was caused by aliens from outer space.

And hey, you know what was entirely missing from this review? Ron Perlman and Nicolas Cage jokes! What the hell? Shouldn’t a film with both of them together be absolutely loaded with opportunities to make ridiculous jokes and riff on their performances? But no, they’re actually not too bad in this. The one thing that could have saved this movie was totally ridiculous, hammy performances by these two, and the film is so shitty, it couldn’t even grant me that one small pleasure. And I think that’s the final straw. This movie sucks! I for one am glad to be done with this brain sodomy forever. Avoid at all costs!

Eh, fuck it. Just have a beer and celebrate the four-year anniversary of Cinema Freaks! I’ll start you off.

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: Paranormal Activity (2007)

Of all the movies in the horror genre these last ten or fifteen years, nothing has changed the landscape more than the Blair Witch Project. Something about the concept of attractive young people with cameras filming themselves as they wander around in the woods just really caught on. I guess it’s like I said in my “Why do modern horror movies suck?” post a few weeks ago – we’re the Do It Yourself generation. We just love filming, documenting and recording every aspect of our lives as if we are important. And thus, one of our newfound fears is extremely close personal eye-level accounts of horror – we want to see up close what’s killing us.

And though Blair Witch laid the foundations for all of that, Paranormal Activity really took the idea to a new level and brought the fear into peoples’ own homes and everyday lives. It was also the series that showed us how cool everything looked in that dark blue lighting. Since the DVD box proclaims it “a scary at-home viewing experience,” who am I to contest the Confucianistic wisdom of DVD box covers? Let’s review Paranormal Activity.

Director: Oren Peli

Starring: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat

IMDb

We start right off with a guy named Micah who I think has some kind of new sexual disorder – he loves cameras almost as much as his girlfriend.

"Don't worry, Camera! I was just pretending to still be in denial!"

Seriously, this guy is obsessed with cameras. He carries it around everywhere just to talk to her while she’s brushing her teeth or reading on the couch. Like he couldn’t just do that without carrying the camera everywhere.

Seriously though, here’s the basic plot of this thing, if you haven’t been living under a rock the last four years: he wants to use the camera because his girlfriend Katie has been experiencing paranormal activity (TITLE DROP!) since she was a little girl and hasn’t been able to stop it. She tells a story about how when she was a little girl, she used to see a dark hooded figure standing at the foot of her bed which wouldn’t go away. Then her house lit on fire. Uh, I don’t think that’s a demonic spirit. I think that’s a drunk member of the KKK who got the wrong house.

But the movie maintains that it was a demonic spirit. For some reason it’s getting worse just as the movie is starting. Katie wants to go to an exorcist, but because Micah saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose, he decided cameras were the better way to go.

"Allow me to make sure you never have a private moment to yourself ever again..."

The first twenty minutes or so are pretty basic set-up type stuff, which mostly consists of Katie telling Micah to turn the camera off. Which is one of the main things about this movie that imitators ended up copying! Isn’t that awesome? Most of the dialogue in this is actually well done, and feels realistic. But one of the main problems with this movie is just how many excuses they have to make to have the camera in every scene, because, you know – otherwise we wouldn’t have anything at all. So we get tons of scenes that would otherwise be entirely natural and effective, broken up because the actors have to shoehorn in a line about the camera being there – it gets kind of old after the first three or four times.

Seriously, what guy really loves shooting home movies this much? I mean, I get it – sometimes he’s just horsing around and experimenting with the camera, but what about the other scenes, like the talking in the bathroom ones, or just the random bits where she’s sitting on the couch or hanging out with her friend? Did he need to have a camera for all of those moments?

"You could've just come and told us without the camera, you kn---"
"SHUT UP!"

It makes me think the film would have been generally more effective if they’d just reigned in the camera stuff to the really effective scenes at night when stuff really happens. It’s more original the way they did it, but there are only so many ways to say “get that camera out of my face!”

Then we get the bedroom scenes, which are the ones the movie is often remembered for. If you like dark blue lights and scenes of nothing going on while the timer fast-forwards to show us that time is passing, you’ll be in heaven with these. Look out for the special unrated version where they don’t fast forward through these scenes. The movie is 28 hours long! You can also see snippets of the cameraman flashing the audience if you look close at the scene transitions. Buy it at your local Walmart today.

But then everything gets super serious the next morning when Katie finds that – gasp! – her keys have been moved a couple inches off the counter and wound up on the floor! The horror!

And not only that, but when they look at the tapes later, they see that the ghost also added moving a door a few inches to its resume of blood-curdling terror! Nooooooooo!

So yeah, this is your scares for the first act of the movie: doors moving a few inches, and keys on the floor. Can you just feel the horror? I guess it’s serious enough to warrant some exorcist doctor guy coming over though. He talks about some stuff that the movie needs for the trailer: “it’s not human,” “you can’t run from this,” etc, etc, etc…it’s all pretty bland, and the guy is a fairly inconsequential character otherwise. I mean, do we really need a guy sitting on the couch to tell us the thing haunting us isn’t human? Seems pretty self-explanatory to me. What, do they think it’s Dennis the Menace? Is that suddenly a convincing alternative?

We also get some scenes of Micah researching demons and whatnot – it’s not too long of a scene, and I don’t mind it, but it does point out a chief difference between this and the old movies of the 70s and 80s. It’s just too serious and orthodox. The film takes its religious demon science as just that – a science, and endows it all with a sort of dogmatic fervor that doesn’t really lend itself to the kind of cool, bizarre and spontaneous feel that I liked so much in movies like The Beyond, Suspiria or Evil Dead – those movies didn’t need to explain so much what the evil things haunting us are.

Which is scarier - this, or...

...this, with just the bare minimum of explanation?

Now, I am not trying to compare Paranormal Activity to those films as some kind of a basis to slag on PA. They’re very different movies and they have different ways of expressing themselves. But there’s one fundamental flaw in the methodology of a film like this: research is not scary. It’s just not. Having Micah flipping through a book and giving us exposition on the demons sheds light on what should be shrouded in shadows, waiting to scare us. While I won’t try and claim the film after this is bereft of scares, it would have been even more chilling if the movie didn’t feel the need to explain itself and bring in all this super-serious, dogmatic stuff. Horror is scarier when you have no clue what it is you’re dealing with. As this is all obviously fictional and made-up, you don’t have to really go into detail on the science and history behind demons – sometimes it may be beneficial, but most of the time it’s better just to go for the throat and scare us, rather than wasting our time with exposition and explanation of what everything is.

But I digress; you know what’s TRULY scary? A bug in the bathroom! AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!

The true manifestation of evil...really....

Yup, another of this movie’s invaluable contributions to the world of horror – Katie screams for Micah about a spider in the bathroom, because you know; a girl who’s been haunted by demonic hooded figures standing at the foot of her bed would really be afraid of fucking insects. And I also love how Micah goes and grabs his stupid camera before going to help his screaming girlfriend – just imagine if she’d really been in danger. He’d be a real dick in that case! Ha ha ha! What a card.

Then we get some more scenes of sleeping with blue lights. There are some loud noises and Micah shouts at the demon like a deprived pro wrestler laid off for too much contact with the opponents’ genitals. Then they go back to sleep and Katie decides it’s time to go for a little possessed walk down the stairs!

You know, I’m having some trouble seeing into the logic of this demonic creature stalking them. I mean, what has it really done so far? Moved some keys, moved a door a few times, and now made a girl walk outside and sit down. It doesn’t try to harm her, or kill her or anything – it just makes her walk down some stairs and sit outside. Pretty weak there! I bet this demon is the laughingstock at the annual demon convention…the Evil Dead demons and the guys from Poltergeist laugh him out of the hall.

There’s a quite effective scene where Micah sets up some powder on the floor to try and track the demon’s footprints. It leaves the footprints but then leads them to the attic, where Micah finds a picture of Katie as a little girl at her old house which burned down. This is a good, effective horror scene because it’s so inexplicable and chilling – why would that picture be there? It’s very nature is threatening. For that this scene is very well done.

So the demon is that creepy guy from down the street who used to sit outside your house in a white van because "there was no parking by his house."

Then we get the scene where, even though Micah promised he wouldn’t buy a Ouija board, he does it anyway. His reasoning is that he didn’t buy it, he borrowed it! Ha ha ha! What a card, yet again. Somebody get this guy a spot on Comedy Central. Or maybe a seat in Congress.

"What do you mean I'm a lying jackass?"

So we get some pretty good scenes of them arguing and what not; the scenes where you can see how worn out these two are, and the strain it’s putting on their relationship, are quite effective. They try to call back that exorcist doctor guy, who just tells them he can’t help and leaves. He never shows up again even though he says he wants to try to help – so I guess that’s the culmination of that subplot…that guy was a fuckin’ fraud the whole time.

Then because the movie doesn’t seem to know how to explain things aside from turning to the Internet, we get some more backstory awkwardly shoehorned in: apparently some girl named Diane in the 60s had the exact same thing happen to her that Katie has now. What does this tell us? Let’s play a guessing game:

If you selected Answer C, “Nothing,” well, you win a million bucks and the chance to keep watching the movie! (The million dollars is taken back through taxes to pay for the movie.)

If the past few scenes have seemed entirely pointless to you, well, let’s just cut to the chase…we then get the final scenes where they’re planning to just leave, after everything that’s happened. Katie is despondent and weak, and at the end she decides she doesn’t even want to leave anymore, the demon perhaps finally having control over her mind. So they stay for one final night until Katie gets pulled out of bed by the demon:

Then you get perhaps the greatest horror movie scream in the last twenty years from Katie – I’m serious; it is fucking chilling how good this scream is. It’s completely blood-curdling and insane, and most importantly: we never see anything. For once the camera gimmick pays off, because we never see what’s happening to Katie to make her scream like that – we just use our imagination, and that is scarier than anything they could have put on screen. I think they should have just ended the movie right here. Just fade out and give us the credits right now, you bastards!

Unfortunately…

Yup, we get an ending with Micah getting thrown at the camera like a drunk game of college football and then Katie comes up and bites his neck like a vampire who’s watched The Grudge too many times. It’s a hundred times scarier than anything that shitty ass movie series could do, but it’s still pretty weak. I remember seeing this ending in theaters and the whole theater burst out laughing at this bit. I mean how lame can you get?

Fortunately for those among you who, like me, thought this ending was horrible, we get an alternate ending. In this one, she wakes up, goes downstairs and screams just like the theater ending. The movie unfortunately still does not end right there. Instead, she comes back up with blood on her and a knife in her hand, because I guess we really needed to see that or else we’d just assume Micah used his super powers to beat the devil out of her. Really, this scene isn’t a horror movie ending – it’s a promo for the next episode of hit internet TV sensation Hot Girls with Knives!

Unfortunately her time in the spotlight is cut short:

So that’s Paranormal Activity. Was it good? Well…yes. Yes it was.

When this first came out, I thought this movie was a joke. I walked out of the theater disappointed. And for a long time, while I acknowledged the impact it had on the horror world, I just scoffed at people who said it was really anything all that scary. But watching it again, all these years later, I do think it’s good. It’s got some pretty silly and lame parts to it, but overall it’s more good than bad. I see why it scares people. The idea of having no control over your body and surrendering to this demon over such a long period of time is pretty scary. And the movie, despite a few lame bits, has some very good scares as well.

Maybe it’s watching this at home that did it – it really seems to work better in that context, surprisingly enough. Very few movies do. While Paranormal Activity has its share of limitations and flaws, it’s a well done flick and has its merits, too. It influenced a whole new generation of direct-to-video “found footage” films and helped to make that style more prominent in the mainstream. With all the garbage in this subgenre right now, it can be hard to find good shit, but I hope people keep doing it. I hope we get some good movies out of this gimmick, because I really think the potential is there.

Hmm, well, I’ve reviewed all the influential modern horror films I can think of. Hostel isn’t worth my time, and I’ve done the main two. I’ll be damned before I review any of the sequels to either this or Saw. So what’s left for my final October review this year?

Of course! The actual most influential modern horror movie of all time! Why didn’t I think of it before?

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: The Unborn (2009)

The end of the year is nigh and I need to pick a really good movie to close us off for this review-season…something truly worthy and monumental enough to be the last review of 2011. It has to be a movie I truly hate with every fiber of my being, something that I would like nothing more than to crush into a billion pieces. Something generic and ridiculous to the max, with little redeeming value at all. Something that could have been released in a blank white DVD case with the word ‘Horror’ on it and lost nothing of its aesthetic worth at all.

Something like…The Unborn.

Director: David S. Goyer

Starring: Odette Annable, Gary Oldman

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139668/

Why do movies about pregnancy or infants always seem to suck? It never fails. Grace. Nightmare on Elm Street 5. Nine Months. The list goes on – I mean, sure, you had Rosemary’s Baby once upon a time, but that was 40 years ago. These days we get festering loads of ass like this. The Unborn just reeks of phoned in, phony horror from people who wouldn’t know something scary if it came up and bit them. This movie is just horrible. And I can’t wait to get this over with, so let’s get started!

We open with Megan Fox Lite doing one of her morning jogs when she finds a glove on the ground; how exciting, right? Then she turns around and sees a dog with a weird mask on, which looks more like something out of a David Lynch movie – except a really lame David Lynch movie, as there’s really no poetry or mystique to this imagery. Megan Fox Lite follows the dog to a random spot in the woods where she finds a dead baby skeleton that opens its eyes and stares at her – well that’s just rude.

Wow, that looks like something you'd find on the underside of a table in some seedy bar. Sadly this will become a theme for the movie - awful, silly looking CGI fecal matter.

Of course it’s just a nightmare and she wakes up soon after. Then we get her talking to her friend Romy while babysitting, and because Romy is black, she knows all about dream interpretations, voodoo, the supernatural and everything else that will play prominently in the film’s flimsy plot. Because being black automatically equates to being African, which means knowing all about superstitions and magic spells and other stuff like that. How racially sensitive!

"I'm just your average black city girl who knows the whole dictionary of dream interpretations and magic spells. Call me?"

I’d like to note that this is the same chick from Venom who also had the random knowledge of the supernatural in that film too! Sad thing is, I actually think this movie is a step down compared to her last stint as a poorly written racial stereotype…in that movie, at least it made sense, being in the Louisiana swamps. This time it’s just ‘hey! We need a cheap way to shoehorn in bullshit explanations for the supernatural stuff in the movie; go hire a black actress!’

Anyway, Megan Fox Lite gets distracted when she has to go check on the kids, though, and finds the little boy she’s babysitting for holding a mirror shard over the face of his younger sister. He then smacks her across the face with it and says “Jumby is ready to be born,” because little kids are creepy and the filmmakers have zero other ideas.

So then we see that Megan Fox Lite is so excited to be at school that she gets hallucinations in the middle of class! God, how far are we into this again? 10 minutes? Holy crap, can’t you just slow down and tell a story? Is it that hard? We know NOTHING about this character except that she gets jump scared more than the protagonists of The Grudge, The Uninvited and The Ring combined! Not exactly a prideful accomplishment! Where’s the substance? Well, give Hollywood credit, though; they finally achieved their lifelong dream and cut out everything else in a horror movie beyond the retarded jump scares and hallucinations – it’s practically a producer’s wet dream, no effort at all except the most worthless, cheap, pandering garbage imaginable, but still guaranteed to scare legions of idiotic kids with no taste at all. Ka-ching!

We see that Megan Fox Lite goes to an eye doctor with her super-bland-milquetoast boyfriend and a half, and sees Dr. C.S. Lee of Dexter fame, who tells her that she’s been having weird dreams and seeing supernatural things because she needs an eye operation…well that’s stupid. It's even worse than the thing from Haunting of Molly Hartley where they tried to pass off every hallucination as a tumor in the main character's brain. But hey, at least we get to see some shots of her in her underwear later on when she’s at home! So it’s cool.

"Okay Miss Annable, look over here and give an ass shot to the camera to make sure people keep ignoring the ludicrous story and special effects...good! Man, I'm the best director EVER."

Hey, don’t you just love all those scenes in every modern horror movie ever where the heroine stands in front of one of those bathroom mirror cabinets and gets a jump scare? I don’t. But the movie does!

So it isn't in there the first time. Maybe they'll avoid the cliche and...

Nope! WTF is that thing anyway? It looks like that stretching-mouth guy from Legion! Hey, Legion was my first review this year and this is my last. I love tying everything together.

I'm sorry; I can't even find words to describe how bad this is! Hmm...

Yeah that sums it up.

So then Megan Fox Lite goes and sees her dad James Remar (seriously, what’s up with all the Dexter characters?), who tells her that she had a baby brother all along who died in the womb, who they called Jumby…because that’s a logical thing to nickname a baby before it’s born, right? What is that? A new Teletubbies character? Gumby’s half-retarded brother?

But anyway this now connects the dots, as it seems that the ghost of her unborn little brother is now haunting her. Well…that’s a pretty horrible and stupid plot – kind of like something you’d see on Are You Afraid of the Dark. Or rather, the outtakes of Are You Afraid of the Dark, not even good enough to make it onto that show. So I guess it fits with the theme of everything else in the movie being horrible and stupid just fine.

And now it’s time to spin the wheel of Horror Clichés again! We’ve already got ‘bland hot white girl with bland white boyfriend,’ and we ticked off the ‘jump scare involving a mirror cabinet in the bathroom’ twice even! We’re getting to the ‘dialogue that is really nothing more that cheap exposition’ quotient…so what’s left? How about ‘trite and played-out subplot involving the main character’s mother who is no longer around, but has something to do vaguely with the main plot’? Yeah that oughta do it.

Megan Fox Lite looks through some old crap in the attic and finds some pictures that somehow lead her to this old peoples’ home where she talks to an old lady who refuses to tell them anything at all – until about 10 minutes later into the film; spoilers! Until then, we can contend ourselves with stupid shit happening in the bathroom of a nightclub. Spooky!

Yeah that looks like most bathrooms in any big city.

Ugh, this is so horrendous; how much longer is it again? Like an hour? GOD THIS IS TORTURE.

So yeah, the old lady calls her at 2 in the morning or so and asks her to come back to the old peoples’ home to talk to her, and we find out that the old lady is actually her grandmother, who surprisingly never tried to contact her before now, I suppose. Stupid, but hey, it’s The Unborn. We then get a long, boring flashback that tells us this whole thing actually started back in the concentration camps of World War II, when her baby brother died in scientific occult experiments done by Nazi scientists. Because we really needed Nazis in this movie, right? Just give up, movie; you’re way beyond any ability to make us give a crap now.

Apparently a demon possessed his body and the old lady had to kill her brother in order to get rid of the demon. Only that backfired when the demon then decided to haunt the entire bloodline! That’s kind of like putting a band-aid on a small cut right before you realize you were supposed to keep your eyes on the road, and end up driving right off a goddamn cliff.

Being that she’s already spewed out all the worthless exposition the film needed her for, the old lady gets killed off in the middle of the night by a horrible CGI effect, but not before leaving a letter to Megan Fox Lite telling her to never give up and keep fighting and all sorts of other stuff that makes Megan Fox Lite’s eyes well up for some super-cinematic tears with melodramatic music in the background!

"That's right, Miss Annable, just cry your best cliche, over the top movie tears and we'll have the best scene ever. Man, my own directing makes me hot down below!"

And also, what the hell is the logic in this? How would she know to write this letter when she didn’t know she was going to die later? At least try to make sense, you damn movie!

So then she goes to see a guy that looks like Gary Oldman. We already have the Megan Fox look-alike, and now we have the…wait, what do you mean that IS Gary Oldman? He would never do a movie this ba---

Well, okay, one time, but…

Uh, well, maybe twice, but still…

OKAY! OKAY! This is really nothing new for him! Happy? He just has a knack for picking shit films once in a while and this is unfortunately another one he probably won’t want to put on his resume. He’s playing an interminably dull and boring priest who Megan Fox Lite hires to do an exorcism on her. They team up with the only basketball playing expert on exorcisms ever – it’s good to have multiple talents! – and sit around and talk about boring stuff some more.

"OOOOoooooh, look at my abstract weird imagery, aren't I the best and most edgy director ever? David Lynch eat your heart out! I got a dog with an upside down head! Sure it looks like a horrible Photoshop, but it's just so edgy, man!"

I’m all for scenes that establish the story through interesting character nuance, but…that isn’t what this is. This is crappy cheap-ass exposition written by people who have no earthly idea about how to write a story. Literally every bit of dialogue in this damn movie is exposition trying to make the dumbass plot more coherent! Where’s the character connection? I guess they just forgot to write that in! Most of these scenes are just window dressing – just backgrounds and people doing arbitrary things in front of them while they rattle off their hideously asinine exposition. Oh, please, explain the story to us some more, writers! Haven’t gotten enough of that yet! That’s truly the way to invest us!

Oh yeah, and the black chick dies when she gets stabbed by the little boy from across the street. I know, just go with it. Apparently the demon can possess people now! And I guess nobody noticed the little kid leaving his house with one of mommy’s kitchen knives…methinks better parental supervision would be a good idea, perhaps. Not to mention the silliness factor is only multiplied when the demon jumps out of the kid and into the dying girl – why he did that I do not know, as clearly she’s dying and will soon be of no use to him – and puts on his best Exorcist impression. By which I actually mean worst, and cheesiest, Exorcist impression. Sounds more like a castrated frog.

"Don't you ever try to imitate me! I will END YOU!"

The “climax” of the film is a big sloppy mess that pretty much has ‘try-hard’ written all over it. They didn’t have any actual atmosphere or scares, so they put in a nearly unwatchable miasma of people screaming, demonic faces, flashy lights and other stuff that makes the movie look like a little kid screaming for attention because his mom and dad wouldn’t buy him a damn Optimus Prime action figure. Seriously, this is wretched. You have to TRY to be this bad!

"Let it be known...that I...achieved my goal...to be...the blandest horror boyfriend...ever..."

Oh, the boyfriend died? What a Shakespearian tragedy! Seriously, they try to make this whole thing so tragic and whatnot, but really he was a complete cardboard cut-out of a character the whole movie, with no human traits and nothing to distinguish him from the nearest lamppost. So really I feel about as much emotion here as I did the last time I threw out a pair of socks.

The movie ends with Megan Fox Lite finding out she’s pregnant with twins!

Hey, the best actors in the movie have finally arrived!

Uh oh! Irony! That’s a good movie ending, right right? No.

I have spent way too much time already on this, but my god! What kind of festering brain tumor could possibly come up with this? It’s unbearable torture to watch; one of the worst I’ve ever reviewed on this site. There’s just nothing in it that I can describe as any kind of quality. It’s long, it’s stupid, it’s silly and most of all, IT’S BORING. The Unborn is just about everything wrong with 2000s horror wrapped up into one odorous package. I hate this movie and I hate anyone who likes it! Just scrap this crap; throw it in the garbage forever.

As for me, I’m going to go wash this down with some good old New Years celebrations. Happy 2012, folks. See you then!

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