Blu-ray Review: Orphan

Worthless jump scares and an awful ending fill this mess

By: Brad Brevet
Published: Tuesday, October 27th 2009 at 3:13 AM

Orphan is a terrible movie as it knowingly plays into all the horror clichés you can imagine, and does it twice, once to lure you into believing they won't bow down to convention and then a second time to show that they will. The film runs just over two hours, and requires absolute patience from its audience only to completely ruin any expectation you may have had with an ending unworthy of the time you dedicated to watching it.

Oh no, what's going to be behind the kitchen door when she closes it? Nothing, at least not the first time, but watch out that second time. What's going to be in the bathroom mirror when she slides it shut? Again, nothing, but that second time is a doozy.

What's that, the mother had a problem with alcohol and ended up cleaning herself up and has been sober for over a year? Yeah, no way that's not going to come back and bite her when she is the only one that realizes she has adopted a nightmare into the family. And this is on top of the endless onslaught of stupid characters that make up a film that somehow managed to score a RottenTomatoes rating as high as 55%, which includes a 3.5 star rating from Roger Ebert. Oh, the horror, the horror…

Admittedly, the Warner Home Video Blu-ray looks fabulous, but that's not a huge surprise considering I was one of the few fans of director Jaume Collet-Serra's remake House of Wax, which wasn't necessarily top quality filmmaking, but it was a fun horror-filled diversion that saw Paris Hilton get her just due. Collet-Serra has a good eye for slick horror features, but with Orphan he has unfortunately misfired.

The special features on the disc are light and are hardly worth boasting about as the first includes a series of deleted and extended scenes as well as an alternate ending that would have at least strayed from the film's current use of the horror cliché "they're not dead until you've killed them twice" theory as parodied in Zombieland, but it wasn't anything "chilling" as it is described on the box art.

The only other feature is a look back at some of cinema's most iconic "scary child" films from the past including The Bad Seed, Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, The Exorcist and The Brood, but more interesting is the bullshit quote from producer Joel Silver who says Orphan is "as effective as The Sixth Sense and The Others" when it comes to its finale. That one gave me a serious laugh. I'm not sure how he was able to say it with a straight face.

In my opinion the worst kind of horror films are the ones so devoid of scares they must make them up as they go. A little girl hiding under a sheet or people showing up unexpectedly around corners. These are films where the premise alone doesn't conjure up enough fright that the filmmaker must rely on bogus scares along the way to ensure the audience thinks the film itself is scary. Considering I can do this to unknowing friends it proves this is a poor cinematic technique.

Orphan involves itself specifically in these kind of "jump" scare tactics along with an opening so dark and grisly it not only sets the audience up for a movie they aren't going to get, it again relies on tactics that aren't scary as much as they are gross and off-putting. There is a time and place for all of these techniques as long as the story calls for them and they aren't implemented merely to invent scares because your film itself is severely lacking.

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