'Piece of filth'

WORLD makes it a rule not to criticize movies without having seen them. It's time for the exceedingly rare exception.

Orphan is a horror film about a husband and wife who bring a 9-year-old into their family and find that she is a homicidal psychopath. That theme doesn't go well with WORLD's emphasis (and much more importantly, the Bible's emphasis) on adoption as a godly calling. Sometimes adopted kids have problems, but so do other kids, and generalized scare stories about adoption are an affront to God.

Another troubling aspect of this movie, as I saw advance information about it, is how well it fits the abortion lobby's playbook. Some women who abort do so because they see their choice as justifiable homicide vs. life imprisonment. That's obviously faulty thinking, but adoption is the positive alternative-and every happily adopted child is a challenge to the abortionist.

Still, we had planned to review Orphan (rated R), but our terrific prime reviewer, Megan Basham, had a beautiful baby just before the movie opened. I planned to go in Megan's place but then read a review of Orphan in that citadel of liberal relativism, The Washington Post:

"It's hard to know where-and with whom-to begin when assessing the depraved, worthless piece of filth that is Orphan. . . . Surely writers David Leslie Johnson and Alex Mace deserve their own circle of hell for thinking up the story, which moves with breathtaking cynicism from disturbing to grotesque to perverse to ludicrous."

On and on reviewer Ann Hornaday went, eviscerating actors, producer Leonardo DiCaprio, and Warner Bros. execs whose "lust for money, apparently, is exceeded only by their contempt for the suckers who keep on forking it over." We have to do our own movie analysis, but when a pro-abortion newspaper sees an implicitly pro-abortion movie as utterly worthless, we can probably trust its judgment, this one time.

-For productive ways to respond to the film, go to christianalliancefororphans.org