Orphan (2009)

VERDICT:
3/10 Problem Children

It was either go see this or go see G.I. Joe. We all make mistakes.

Orphan is about a husband and wife that up and decide to adopt the weirdest, creepiest kid they could ever happen to come across after the wife experiences a miscarriage years prior. So the kid moves in and ends up being a homicidal psycho bitch.

WHOA! Didn’t see that one coming.

As you can probably guess, Orphan doesn’t really bring anything all that new to the “evil children = scary” genre of horror movies because it all pretty much started and ended with The Omen. There isn’t really all that much left to say on the topic outside of, you know, don’t adopt demon children. Simple as that, you freakin’ idiot parents.

And that’s what’s exactly wrong with this movie. It doesn’t take long for Esther’s new mommy or siblings to figure out that some shit is up, but absolutely everyone else simply cannot wrap their damn minds around the possibility that this already bizarro kid may actually be batshit crazy. As someone who loves horror movies, this kind of crap makes my freakin’ blood boil. It’s as though all the protagonists in this movie have been placed in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, only instead of dealing with wildly irrational and unreasonable people about mundane things like say, picking up a hooker so that you can use the carpool lane on a highway, you’re defending your sanity to people over a little girl whose past in an utter and complete mystery to even the people you adopted her from and for some reason she insists on dressing like a Hot Topic employee.

Seriously? Look at this kid. She’s fuckin’ nuts. Move on, let someone else adopt her. End of story.

I don’t know, the whole experience of having to sit through this movie just bothered me, and not in a good way, like Se7en or something. The movie ends up just playing out as an excuse for Esther to completely torture her mother in one tasteless fashion after the next and it just rubbed me the wrong way. After a while it just felt like, “Why? Why go through the trouble of making this movie so unnecessarily mean?” Ridiculous.

The movie starts out good enough and for a half-hour or so entertains the idea that it won’t totally suck, but then everyone starts taking Esther’s side and all you can do is wait for the inevitable and think, “Esther is going to kill all you naysayers, and because you’re all being jackasses, you pretty much deserve it.”

If you didn’t catch on from all the subtle hints in the poster, there’s a twist ending that finally reveals what’s wrong with Esther. You hope for it to be great and that it will give you a completely new outlook on the shitty mess you’ve been watching for nearly two hours, but since there’s already so many twists you can think up for a movie like this and it really isn’t that hard to see what it’s going to be long before it just affirms what you think it is, the twist totally sucks.

The point is, don’t see Orphan. The scares suck, they’re all cheap and stupid, it’s an utterly infuriating movie to sit through, and it’s a total knockoff of this crap movie that came out a good while back called The Good Son, only the demon spawn in question is Macaulay Culkin, back when he was the coolest kid on the planet.

So way to go, Orphan. It now sucks even more to be an orphan named Esther.