SPLICE 1.5***

“Splice” is the story of scientists taking a ‘slice’ of life (DNA) from several animal species and combining them with a ‘slice’ of the DNA from a human and seeing what kind of ‘spice’ they can get from such a very risky roll of the ‘dice’. Unfortunately for the scientist, things don’t turn out to well and the same is true for “Splice” which ,despite an attempt to ‘entice us with an interesting premise, and that’s about all, should have stayed on ‘ice’ and gone directly to DVD sales and rental.

This movie gets repulsive and preposterous in the first few scenes. Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) are a biochemist couple who do experimental gene splicing for a big pharmaceutical corporation. They create two repulsive worm-like things they call Ginger and Fred, wrinkly, gnarly abominations like faceless and limbless pigs, which are supposed to be the wonderful new source of a wealth of proteins and enzymes usable for medicines. Against their corporate boss's prohibitions, Elsa sneaks off and goes one step further: She grows a new species that blends various animal DNA with human DNA. The thing that comes out looks like a giant man-eating tadpole, or a flying snake. In time it gives birth to a little fledgling that grows up into a kind of bald, sweet-faced gir, then young woman, on spindly bird legs. Actually a better description is a female creature from the hips up with an odd shaped face and bald head, that has chicken legs from the hips down with a particularly nasty pig-like tail that conceals a dangerous talon. She is named Dren (that’s Nerd spelled backwards), and she has a very accelerated grow rate and quickly goes from a baby to a child to a squeaky adult ( she can’t talk because her vocal cords are bird-like).
Some of the many problems with the movie have to do with the fact that the characters change their basic personality and nature without any apparent motivation. Dren goes from precocious to hostile to flirty. Sarah Polley performs a gruesome surgery on Dren which, although it serves a plot point, is way out of character and Adrian Brody does something that is just plain disgusting (the audience let out an initial huge groan, then laughed really loud, an uncomfortable, “I can’t believe it’s happening” laugh, which I’m sure was not the intended reaction).
No matter how you slice it, “Splice” is a interesting concept that goes terribly wrong … very poor writing is the chief culprit plus a sellout of the integrity of the film, what little there was, for a “Hollywood” ending that was intended to stir up the horror movie fans but, instead, just ends up being horrible.

Clark