Splice (2010)

Warning: mild spoilers ahead

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum): I think you're making a mistake. I think you really want to talk to me.
Ronnie (Geena Davis): Sorry, I have three other interviews to do before this party's over.
Seth: Yeah, but they're not working on something that'll change the world as we know it.
Ronnie: They say they are.
Seth: Yeah, but they're lying. I'm not.

With these words, David Cronenberg let us know exactly what his seminal remake of The Fly (1986) was all about. Seth Brundle was a twitchy New York hipster living in one of those lofts usually reserved for artists and junkie musicians, a bit intense and somewhat asocial but no more so than your average Silverlake barhopper, who thought he could rewrite the laws of physics just because he wanted to. 1980s yuppie hubris taken to the nth degree. Needless to say, it did not end well for him.

Splice, the new movie from Cube (1997) director Vincenzo Natali, really wants to be The Fly. I mean really, really, REALLY. And in Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody, Natali has not one but TWO twitchy hipster scientists with rock star egos. Their Elsa and Clive (classic horror fans, feel free to groan at the hamfisted reference) have turned gene splicing into a Barnum and Bailey circus, and they're chomping at the bit to take the next step and begin working with human DNA.

Where Cronenberg and Goldblum managed to infuse Brundle with an intensity and an animal reservoir of anger that made his subsequent transformation into "Brundlefly" seem as much a spiritual metaphor as a piece of science fiction, we're supposed to know that Elsa and Clive are rebels because they have emo haircuts and a penchant for plaid suits and rose-colored sunglasses (one of the best unintentionally hilarious moments comes when we meet Clive's brother, who looks nothing like him except for the identical My Chemical Romance-lite mop).

These people are ROCKERS (Clive listens to some truly awful heavy metal in his car). They don't got no use for authority, man. So when their corporate overlords forbid them from making a human/animal hybrid, they go ahead and do it anyway...and to an A-Team style montage backed by the most boring electronica soundtrack since Spawn no less.

I'll go ahead and say it now: Splice is an absolutely terrible movie. It takes itself way too seriously, has dialogue that sounds like it was written by a third-grader, has two of the most annoying central performances in recent memory (yes, even more annoying than Get Him To The Greek), and nothing any of the characters does makes any goddamned sense whatsoever.

But, until it takes a gratuitously ugly turn in the last ten minutes or so, it's also pretty frickin' hilarious. When one of the characters actually utters the line "I don't know who you are anymore!" after catching another character having all sorts of dirty nasty animal/human hybrid sex on the floor of a barn, the audience I saw it with was rolling in the aisles.

The only character who has even a hint of substance is the hybrid herself, DREN (Delphine Chanéac). In her own weird way, she's kind of endearing, and there are one or two moments that are actually sort of maybe a little scary. There's a kernal of an interesting idea here, buried behind the piss poor execution. Oh well.

I can't really recommend this movie at all. Just rewatch The Fly instead. But if you feel like getting really wasted and going to laugh at a movie at the dollar theater, I guess you could do a lot worse.