Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are hipster geneticists and director Vincenzo Natali (Cube) ups the ante to create a hybrid horror that grafts the cine-DNA from Frankenstein, Rosemary’s Baby and The Fly.
Natali has cross-bred a self-serious psychodrama and a queasy creature-feature, and unleashed this malformed freak on the world.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2010
Splice 2009
Not since the gory, hilarious Re-Animator first exploded onto the scene has the sci-fi horror genre seen so much demented fun. A decade in development, it took the backing of Guillermo del Toro and a large FX budget for this experiment in horror to finally reach the big screen. Vincenzo Natali, director of the cult hit Cube, has upped the ante and created a hybrid horror that grafts the cine-DNA from Frankenstein, Rosemary’s Baby and The Fly. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are hipster geneticists whose brilliant experiments in bioengineering involve recombining DNA from different animals. As in all mad scientist movies, after being warned not to continue, the hungry-for-fame geneticists do exactly that and before you can scream ‘Help meeeeee!’ a human-animal embryo begins gestating. The resulting creature feature upholds its B-movie origins even as it delivers perverse eye-popping set-piece action and extraordinary state-of-the-art FX. — AT