![]() When the film’s witchy corporate high priestess introduces Elsa and Clive at what turns out to be a disastrous “King Kong”-style “demonstration” as “splice-masters extraordinaire,” you expect instead the writers and director of this unpleasant cut-and-paste job to step out and take a bow. The only new twist is a gender-bending/incest theme. All the cliches of such films – “Species,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Alien,” you name it – converge in the screenplay by a trio of writers including director Vincenzo Natali (“Cube”). There, female Dren goes all emo, learns to pluck her eyebrows, wear makeup and sexy chemises and grows into something only the fans of the “Jeepers Creepers” films could love. After it’s too late, they play a game of “Bringing Up Baby,” shuttling fast-growing Dren (Delphine Chaneac as a young adult) from basement to a barn on a farm Elsa conveniently owns. ![]() While it is often evocative of David Cronenberg’s early work, especially in terms of the squirm-yuck factor, “Splice” lacks that work’s intelligence.Ĭlive and Elsa tool around the area (Toronto, I presume) in a vintage AMC Gremlin (typically, a detail too clever for its own good), struggling with whether to abort their genetic atrocity. While there is a certain amusement to be derived from listening to Best Actor Academy Award winner Brody intoning the line, “Severing umbilical cord,” or hearing Elsa exultingly shout, “It’s alive,” or the fact Elsa and Brody’s Clive (Get it?) dub their previous monstrosities Ginger and Fred, the film is too secondhand. She even names it Dren, as in Nerd in reverse. It’s Franken-Manga-baby.īut Elsa (Get it?) loves the abomination like a deranged mommy. this ain’t, although instead of Reese’s Pieces, it loves Tic-Tacs. The result is a purring, chirping, tadpole-ish creature with double-jointed legs and a tail with a deadly stinger. When Polley’s Elsa adds a DNA sample she names “Jane Doe’ to a melange of genetic animal muck and fertilizes an egg with it, you want to shout out, “Jane, don’t.” Part “Frankenstein,” part “Freaks,” the horror film/cautionary tale “Splice” is derivative and disturbing.Īdrien Brody and Sarah Polley play genius scientists (like I said, disturbing) who slave for an evil corporation and decide against all the rules of previous movies to “play God.”
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