While most tikes in the '80s were wearing out copies of kid-friendly cartoons on VHS, the movies I grew up on were scary as hell. My father's genre of choice has always been horror, and during the decade-and-a-half when I had little to no say in the evening's entertainment, the two of us sprawled out on the living room floor and watched nearly every scary TV show or video released in the horror section of our local video store at least once. Being brought up on a diet of buckets of blood and boobs circa 1985 (blame evolution or casting directors, but they're notably different than modern boobs) makes me hopeful whenever I see a promising trailer like the one for sci-fi thriller Splice.

In those 90 seconds, I could still hold out hope that the genre responsible for the stupid shit that kept me up at night as a child (The Brain, The Gate, Gremlins) matured with my taste in film, offering solid scares but finding a way to work in a reasonable plot and at least an attempt at acting.

Does Splice deliver? More after the jump.

No, but after years of being disappointed with horror films I've come to realize the things that draw me to the genre are the same qualities keeping the final product from being worthwhile by critical standards. Splice is reminiscent of the films I loved and was terrified of as a kid—a creature feature that's laughable and intentionally absurd at times that offers what you'd come to expect from the genre. Such as:

A heavy-handed moral message
When will scientists learn man shouldn't play God? Splice is a not-so-distant future Frankenstein story constructed from pieces of Rosemary's Baby and Species.

Gratuitous sex and/or nudity
Monster boobs? Check. Dren, a Sloth-faced, wall-eyed femme fatale with animal features and a scorpion tail, is surprisingly more sexy than scary. She goes from a cute kid to kind of hot and doesn't really bare teeth until far into the movie. Credit seems likely due to Splice producer Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, Blade II) as the work put into Dren's appearance involves some top-notch moving-making magic.

It's behind you!
The music swells and bad stuff goes down. Splice has a handful of well-crafted tense moments, but despite what the trailer may lead you to believe, it's not so much a dark tale of twisted science as it is a sci-fi romp with some mostly PG-13 moments of shock comedy.

A comedy of terrors
It's not as silly as Slither (though it offers some of the same ickiness) nor as campy as Critters, but Splice had the crowd laughing harder than most comedies I've seen this year.

Boring, unnecessary plot set up
In typical horror fashion, the first act is basically a snooze. When the science is made up, do we really have to sit through an explanation of it?

Blood and guts
Splice uses the red gushy stuff sparingly, but there's at least one scene to get fans of the fluid of life pumped.

Running up the stairs instead of out the door
Splice suffers from no shortage of the poorly thought out decisions you've come to expect from protagonists in the genre. For a couple (literally) of scientists, Clive (Adrien Brody, Hollywood's ugliest pretty boy and star of The Pianist) and his baby-crazy girlfriend, Elsa (Sarah Polley, the blond chick from Go and the Dawn of the Dead remake) are often completely brainless.

Predictable
Maybe, but even the scenes you see coming from a mile away demand your attention when they finally go down.

Splice is absurd horror-humor, with a few moments to get the crowd squirming but, unless you're really easily startled, more laughs than you'd expect. Sure, it's a bit more low-brow than the mind games of Cube (Splice director Vincenzo Natali's cult classic), but Splice is like an amusement park roller coaster or (better yet) a haunted house—you know the thrills are manufactured and you can see what's coming, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun.

--Eric Pulsifer