'Splice' at the Galaxy a muddled Frankenstein update
“Splice,” a 2009 movie that won some independent film awards, is playing at the Carson City Fandango Galaxy for the next couple of weeks, depending on how many people plunk down several dollars to see the film. It’s a sc-fi fantasy outing, with the plot lifted more or less from the Dr. Frankenstein concept of Mary Shelly.
Only it’s updated with modern science and all the lab equipment of our times and it uses two lab buddies as the mad scientists and a bald freak as the Monster.
Seems Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) working together have spliced four genes together to create an ugly new animal, at first loveable but later deadly.
The bio firm that hires them turns down their plan to splice human genes in with other genes to create a new being who could do much to end diseases with its made-up body and genes. So the two go out on their own and splice a bunch of genes together to create a sort of hairless, slick bodied Monster.
Kast, who it’s hinted lost a daughter sometime in the past, develops a loving relationship with the new creature, calling it Dren (nerd backwards, of course). To escape problems at the company lab they smuggle Dren to an isolated farmhouse somewhere where there is snow on the ground. Never mind that the farmhouse looks like it can barely stand, holes in the walls, nobody gets cold there and nobody’s breath ever clouds.
So Dren grows up, fairly attractive except for the split forehead and funny goat-like legs. Things get messy when Dren goes for Clive and the two have sex (weird, to say the least). Meanwhile, Kast goes back to the lab and creates a gene that everybody’s been waiting for. She comes back and nabs Dren and Clive in the sex act, and oddly enough is displeased. (The nudity is about an unexciting at a dead finish.)
Dren, who can grow wings in moments, climbs the house and changes into a male. (This is fantasy, remember.) Clive and Kast battle the monster and in the process Kast engages in sex with the male monster.
But she kills the thing and in an afterward discusses it with the head of the lab. (Spoiler here: Don’t read this if you plan to see the movie: Kast becomes pregnant from the monster. Call for a sequel?)
Why Brody and Polley ever let themselves get involved in such an illiterate movie is something to ponder. (The movie gets its science all wrong, not to mention improbable.) Biggest question to this viewer is how the got the images of D’s running around on goat legs? I know, as “Avatar” showed you can do pretty weird things with movie technology. But sex with the monster? By both stars? Mary Shelly, where are you when we need you?
Rated R at the very least.
Vincenzo Natali (director) / Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant, Doug Taylor (screenplay)
CAST
Adrien Brody as Clive Nicoli
Sarah Polley as Elsa Kast
Delphine Chanéac as D’s
David Hewlett as Barlow
Abigail Chu as Young D’s
Brandon McGibbon as Gavin Nicoli
Stephanie Baird as Elsa / PD
— Sam Bauman is Carson Now's movie writer