ROGER CORMAN and CHEESE, part II: "The Unborn" and Motor City Pizza Co. 5 Cheese Bread

Corman is always credited for giving a lotta now-famous talents their first gigs, and certainly that's true: many crew members and actors broke away from the Drive-In and onto The Red Carpet. 1991's The Unborn is a colorful mixed bag of such talents - and fortunately that's not its sole source of pride. 

Brooke Adams plays Virginia, a seemingly infertile woman who undergoes an experimental fertilization procedure that does indeed put a bun in the oven. But is the bun actually bad? The whole second act is made up of that very suspense, full of not so much clues but instead graphic set pieces that depict what a horrible time all the other previous "test mothers" are having. Once movie logic locks in and Virginia is as certain as we are that there's an evil fetus in her body, it does become effectively unnerving - less Rosemary's Baby, more Alien. For a movie produced by Roger Corman (though uncredited) it relies largely on mood and mystery and less on nudity and gore, and it does so pretty effectively; cinematography by Chris Nolan's go-to DP Wally Pfister and music score by Gary Numan are doing a decent bit of the heavy lifting, but Brooke Adams and her ambitious performance is mostly what we take away from this film... That, and a very early acting gig from Lisa Kudrow, whose scenes are cut and framed in such a way that the movie almost seems aware that she'll become a big star. 

A cheesy bread sounded like a somewhat lighter option to pair with the insemination movie about mutant child birth. Truth is this "bread" is as hardcore as any pizza - and just as good if not better. We've tried "three cheese" this and "four cheese" that and "a hundred cheese" whatever and quite frankly the cheeses all start to taste the same when you mix 'em together, but the thing that elevates this above some dipping appetizer is that there's a layer of parmesan sauce between the bread and the cheese, which not only places it alongside the superiority of a traditional pizza, but the inclusion of a tangy cream dressing gives it that extra credibility for snacking during a gross-out pregnancy flick. 

The Movie: B

The Pizza: A-