Splice: Half Human, Half Animal Sampler, All Crap

Oh, if only she had stayed a somewhat mangled Greyhound.

I like sci-fi horror as much as the next gal, although a small, perverse part of me wishes that it was called scifiho, pronounced almost like syphilis. That personal oddity aside, I was very excited to check out Splice last week.

It's directed by Vincenzo Natali, so I was already ready to pay cheap-night prices after watching Cube a few months ago. I had also read some plot spoilers, and figured that if even half of them were true, it would be enough to power cultural studies classes on gender, motherhood and sex for months. Plus, the reviews were good.

THEY WERE ALL LIES. Instead of being an interesting take on the Frankenstein myth, Splice feels like a syndicated action show and is acted like a telenova. I even went with a friend who was excited to see it, but afterwards only had issues with the "depiction of sex and gender" (her Facebook comment, June 2010) in the film.

I could see her point, but felt like that was one of the ways in which the movie did not screw things up completely. For those of you who aren't interested in wasting $8-12 on a ticket, let me give you a brief plot summary. For those who hate themselves, thar be SPOILERS ahead.

Ilsa and Clive are hotshot genetic engineers with racy cover shots on Wired, as one so frequently encounters in life. Knowing that their unit will be closed down and converted before they can succeed in playing with human DNA, they illicitly combine that with their last experiment. And so, Dren is born.

She looks like a bald, bug-eyed human with goat legs and gecko feet. Since Ilsa and Clive have never seen any SF movies, but we have, we are not as surprised as they are when Dren turns out to be a bit of a problem. She's got a stinger and she's not afraid to use it, but the real issue has to do with sex. Not only does she have a creepy round of father figure banging with Clive, but when this changes her sex to male, she also rapes Ilsa.

Since Ilsa used her own DNA to create her and male-Dren kills Clive, it's like s/he gets to have her Oedipal cake and her Electra complex too. Another one of my friends pointed out that the differences between she-Dren (who seduces) and he-Dren (who rapes) are more than a little problematic as well.

However, I'll almost give the movie a pass on that since both modes are part of her monstrous, constructed nature and could, almost, be seen as a critique of assumptions about how natural gender roles are.

Then again, I don't want to work that hard to salvage this movie. And it is a lot of stretching. So, if there is anything radical about it, it's so incoherent that it doesn't even matter.The movie just sucks on its own.

I know I'm a difficult moviegoer, but if a theatre of more generous types is laughing at your showcase scenes, then you've got a problem. Even Sex And The City 2 had some people who took the film seriously.