![]() The science jargon is so convincing that when something finally “takes,” the fetus comes - unbelievably quickly - to term, a tendriled thingummy leaps into Elsa’s face, and she shouts, “It’s alive!” it takes a second to realize that Colin Clive shouted the same damn thing in 1931 over Boris Karloff. Realign the diggihoop proton volnoid acid.” Scientific things. It’s fun to watch their faces in the blue-gray half-light as they stick long needles into amniotic sacs and stare into computer screens and mutter things like, “Why isn’t it taking?” and “Wait - I think I’ve got it. So Clive and Elsa think: Why not mix in human DNA and see what grows? Just to, you know, prove we can. But then company bigwigs order them to stop researching and start generating capital. In Splice, Canada’s own Sarah Polley and skinny-faced Adrien Brody play Clive and Elsa, celebrated nerd-dreamboat scientists for a pharmaceutical company - called, as it happens, NERD, for “Nucleic Exchange Research Development.” When we meet them, they’re delivering a new life-form from a pulsing ovum in an incubator - a giant wormy mass from which they hope to mine all kinds of patent-worthy medical procedures. (Revenge-of-the-repressed stories work especially well in cold climes full of white people.) And these mutant cells have a metaphorical component, as much a product of repressed emotions as liberated biochemistry. It makes you think that Ontario horror has practically become a subgenre, with its faceless, sterile modern settings, wintry and blue-lit, in which new kinds of flesh are grown or hatched. It’s David Cronenberg Lite - a dash of The Brood, a soupcon of The Fly - but that’s not a bad thing. In the context of modern horror, a solid B-movie like Vincenzo Natali’s Splice looks positively splendiferous, with a mixture of icky and poignant and terrifying that works like gangbusters. But mostly we get zombies, splatter, torture porn, zombies, lame remakes, zombies. SPLICE 2 MOVIE HOW TOGiven all the gene-mapping and cloning these days, you’d think movies would be lousy with Frankenstein scenarios and cautionary tales in which technology outpaces our understanding of how to employ it. ![]()
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