10 Awesome Movies You Won't Believe Got A Rotten Rating On RottenTomatoes

7. Orphan

Tomatometer Rating: 55% Compared to other genres, horror has a real problem when it comes to mainstream outings. Dramas, thrillers or even comedies can come in all manner of flavours, but their scary cousin is not only haunted by tropes, it appears obliged to include them. Sure, there's plenty of sub-genres - slasher, torture porn, chiller - but within these, movies tend to boil down to the same basic ideas. Orphan is certainly one of those, appearing a pretty rote exercise. It's a creepy child story, with a mother slowly realising adoptive daughter isn't as innocent as she seems, stuffed with disbelieving husbands, useless officials and clearly labelled plot devices (a biological daughter is deaf just so we can have a silent scene). And, as the posters so gleefully announced, there's a big twist. Good luck paying attention to the film when you're trying to guess what Esther's secret is. The thing is, while Orphan does follow the genre clichés, it does it in a manner not dissimilar to The Conjuring; it's so adept in what it's doing it doesn't matter that you've seen it before. Isabelle Fuhrman plays both innocence and unmasked horror to unnerving effect, even convincing (spoiler) as a thirty-three year old midget. Sounds silly, but trust us, it works in the film. The only real negative is the final showdown, which sees Esther become another of the indestructible killers that plague the genre. An alternate ending, where she reapplies her girl facade and escapes into the hand of the police, would have been infinitely more menacing.