THE UNBORN

A blue glove left in the snow. A dog wearing a porcelain mask. A discarded foetus under brambles and bushes.

For the first five minutes, The Unborn is a peculiar mix of The Nightmare on Elm Street style dream sequences and something you might find in a Dali painting.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t last long and when we realise what all this means, the next 85 minutes are one hell of a struggle.

Odette Yustman is a young college student who still mourning the death of her mother some years previously starts to have strange dreams about a blue-eyed child.

It soon emerges the child was Odette’s twin her mother lost at birth and now for no reason really than cheap thrills and lashings of gore, it has decided to come back and haunt her.

This wouldn’t be so bad if director David S. Goyer (writer of Jumper and The Dark Knight) wasn’t so transfixed with trying to scare the audience at every given turn rather than trying to tell a relatively good horror tale.

Characters are as thin as breadsticks, the dialogue is appalling and one wonders how talent as masterful as Gary Oldman managed to find his way into this story.

Of course, the film makes a fantastic trailer - something which certainly makes this forgettable tale look rather less trashy than it is.

But nothing can disguise the fact The Unborn should never have been born.

Rating: *