THE UNBORN (1991)
Perhaps it was the resurrection of the It’s Alive series with part 3, Island of the Alive in 1987 that motivated the 1991 movie The Unborn. Well, that and Rosemary’s Baby, which the majority of this movie mimics.
Horror veteran Brooke Adams (Invasion of the Body Snatchers 78, Shock Waves, The Dead Zone, The Stuff, Sometimes They Come Back) can’t get pregnant.
The rocking chair trick didn’t work.
So she and her husband go to a fertility doctor—James Karen, known to 80s kids as the Pathmark man and the old guy from Return of the Living Dead 1&2. Brooke gets the treatment and then slowly begins to lose her mind and fear her unborn fetus.
In the meantime, we’re treated to horrible acting, Lisa Kudrow in a 2-second role as a receptionist….
a soundtrack by Gary Numan of “Cars” fame….
and a few scenes of horror involving other infertile women who have gone to the Pathmark man.
But most importantly, we get Kathy Griffin as a man-hating lesbian who runs a birthing class and wants to convert all the mommies-to-be! Awesome. Why did all the lesbians of the early 90s waste their hating on Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct? Kathy’s big scene provides the only humor in the whole film.
There’s finally some carnage at the end when Brooke digs her mutant baby from a dumpster. The baby gets way too little screen time and clearly must have demanded to be the star of the sequel.
You used me just to get some boob in the movie!
THE UNBORN II (1994)
The baby’s back! And he’s better than before. Seriously. This piece of crap is better than the first because it’s more of a copycat of It’s Alive. Which is why it’s kind of weird that it’s called The Unborn II, because this mutant baby is alive and killing.
Catherine, a single mom, moves into a new town. One of her neighbors is Scott Valentine, Mallory’s boyfriend Nick from Family Ties.
There’s also a nosy neighbor with a hot teenage daughter, who Catherine hires to babysit, even though she won’t let anyone see the baby and keeps the nursery door locked!
Oh. There’s also a female Terminator who goes around killing these evil babies. Just WAIT until you see the maternity ward shootout. And yes. There are dead babies involved.
So I guess the Pathmark man from the first film was a majorly successful infertility doctor, because there are now evil babies everywhere. We’re left to deduct all this because there’s no reference made to the events of the first movie, even though they easily could have made Catherine the Brooke Adams character—much of her background story almost implies she is but it’s never spelled out.
There’s tons of mutant baby action in this one, classic knee-high camera POV, plenty of people who can’t mind their own business turn into human pacifiers, and there’s even an absurdly entertaining twist that offers an excuse for Scott Valentine to have some relevance to the plot.
Really, direct-to-video horror films of the 90s were like the direct-to-SyFy movies of today, and The Unborn movies are just as bad as every other horror flick that came out during the worst decade of horror films ever. But The Unborn II is better bad than the boring bad of the first The Unborn.
