Casey (Odette Yustman, “Cloverfield”) is a North Shore college student with much to learn about her past: how her placenta strangled her twin brother in the womb, what made her mom make a silent 16mm horror film about a old door and then kill herself, and why her mom’s mom killed her own twin in 1944 after Dr. Josef Mengele (Braden Moran) tried to change the boy’s eye color to an Aryan shade of blue in Auschwitz. Who knew? Underlying all this horror is a dybbuk, a rootless entity seeking a homeland in chosen souls. Casey—who also seems to now learn she’s Jewish—learns how to fight the dybbuk after stealing a medieval how-to tome and imploring Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman) to translate it from Hebrew. Now he can perform a “Jewish exorcism” with an assist from a basketball-playing Episcopalian minister (Idris Elba). So goes “The Unborn,” a dumbish horror tale shot in abandoned Barat College buildings. Writer-director David S. Goyer overuses aerial shots and too often cuts to a dybbukized tyke popping out of mirrors to shriek like a rabid howler monkey wearing blue contact lenses. His earlier screenwriting credits include “Jumper,” the two latest “Batman”s and all three “Blade”s. You’d expect better shocks from editor Jeff Betancourt (“The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” both of “The Grudge”s and “The Ruins”). Specious disclaimer in the end credits: “No actual Torah scrolls were destroyed or damaged in the making of this motion picture.” Huh? Neither virtual nor actual Torahs were ever in peril in Goyer’s plot. Even with all the possessed potato bugs and mean dogs with upside-down heads running around. “The Unborn” ends with an implied endorsement of abortion as a lesser evil when ancient chants fail against a greater evil. With Meagan Good, Cam Gigandet and Jane Alexander. 87m. (Bill Stamets)
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