Review: Splice

Available here. Some spoilery content to follow.

About halfway through Splice, I wrote in my notes “There is something seriously wrong with this.” Little did I know just how much more wrongness was yet in store. You want monstery semi-incest? Oh, Splice has got monstery semi-incest. For me, that actually improved the movie, which till that point had been one long slog of unpleasant characters doing fairly insane things.

This appears to be one of those “critics love it, audiences hate it” movies. It’s pulling a 73% at Rottentomatoes; Keith Phipps of the AV Club gave it a B+. Meanwhile, the reader reviews peg it a full grade lower, at a C+.

I just never connected with it at all. The characters are bozos. As for the plot, I’ve seen more rising action in matzo bread. The creature struck me as silly, overacted and cliched. By the climax, I had my full-on clinical detachment going strong. What could have been a creepy, shuddersome finale just looked cat-swingingly crazy.

This is a case where the grade scale needs some context. At a D+, it may look like I thought Splice was worse than Transformers 2 (C-) or The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (C). Au contraire! Those movies failed in very boring, average, unentertaining ways. Splice failed in fun, messed-up ways. If you’re gonna fail, fail big.