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.
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