Unborn 10/23 Blu-ray (Rental)

Product Description Enter a world of unrelenting evil as terror finds a new form in The Unborn. From the producers of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the co-writer of The Dark Knight comes this shocking supernatural thriller about a young woman (Odette Yustman) plagued by chilling dreams and tortured by a demonic ghost that haunts her waking hours. Her only hope to break the debilitating paranormal curse is in an exorcism with spiritual advisor Sendak (Gary Oldman). See what lies beyond the doorway of our world in this non-stop nightmare of the undead… Amazon.com Gary Oldman as an exorcist in an evil-twin movie inflected with Jewish mysticism? You're already halfway there, right? Hold on, because The Unborn is one of those horror movies that sounds more intriguing in synopsis than it plays. Pity unfortunate babysitter Odette Yustman (Cloverfield), who begins experiencing weird visions just about the time she learns she had a twin that died before birth. Said ghostly twin is suddenly popping up everywhere, leading Yustman to visit a rabbi (that's Oldman) who suspects she is haunted by a dybbuk, a spirit of Jewish legend. All of which is a reasonable set-up, but the movie that results is so ham-fistedly written and played that a few good early shocks dissolve in general ludicrousness. Writer-director David S. Goyer, who worked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, displays a tin ear here--the presence of a surprisingly decent cast (Jane Alexander, Idris Elba) simply demonstrates how bad the dialogue is: if they can't speak it, nobody could. The movie's biggest reach is tying its half-baked creepy-kid act to a backstory that includes Auschwitz--well, you can't say Goyer lacks nerve. There's always Oldman, who never backs down from a little scenery chewing if the cause is already lost. It's not enough to salvage this one. --Robert Horton