Movie Review: Splice

Sometimes if you miss something during the Sundance Film Festival you may get the chance to catch it a few months down the line up on the big screen. Lots of movies premiere at Sundance after having already been picked up by a major studio. This time around comes Splice, a new Warner Bros./Dark Castle Entertainment pickup from director Vincenzo Natali, who also brought us another Sundance cult classic, Cube, back in 1997.

With Guillermo del Toro’s name attached as an executive producer one can’t help but be instantly intrigued as he has yet to deliver anything that wasn’t awesome. Whether behind the camera himself (Cronos, Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone, the two Hellboys, Pan’s Labyrinth) or as producer (The Orphange) he manages to bring something humanly fantastical in every sense to the screen every time.

But when you also throw in Joel Silver and his Dark Castle Entertainment to the mix (House on Haunted Hill, Thir13een Ghosts, Ghost Ship, Gothika, House of Wax, The Reaping, Orphan, Whiteout and Ninja Assassin) one can’t help but wonder how the two will, well, splice together. And that’s exactly what happens. Somewhere around the one hour mark things go completely awry and the markings of one producer’s guiding hand clearly become the other and it’s blatantly obvious which influences came from whom.

Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) are two leading edge scientists working for a genetics research company called Newstead Pharmaceuticals. They've just combined a mixture of animal DNA to form new creatures they’ve named Fred and Ginger who produce enzymes that can potentially cure everything from cancer to diabetes. Elsa, continually asking “What could possibly go wrong?” wants to take their research to the next level and introduce human DNA to the mix even while Clive is at least slightly resistant but goes along in spite of the ethical and legal ramifications if something happens.

At first they have no luck but then Elsa asks Clive to try one more human sample and of course, as it always goes, the human DNA takes and a new species begins developing at an alarming rate. Clive instantly wants to terminate the project as they originally only wanted to see if they could do it but Elsa decides she wants to keep the new creature alive and bring it to term. A crossbreed is born looking something like a human rabbit with a defense stinger in its tail and a convenient affinity for Tic Tacs the same way Elsa keeps packing them away. Now Elsa and Clive have to keep their new experiment under wraps even though Elsa has named her Dren (Delphine Chanéac, a surefire future Mr. Skin celebrity.)

Article Author: Cinenerd

A Utah based writer, born and raised in Salt Lake City, UT for better and worse. Cinenerd has had an obsession with film his entire life, finally able to write about them since 2009, and the only thing he loves more are his wife and their two wiener dogs (Beatrix Kiddo and Pixar Animation). …

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