The two recognizable stars of Splice, a pleasurably shivery, sometimes delightfully icky horror movie about love and monsters in the age of genetic engineering, are Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, a well-matched pair of earthbound oddities. Given their respective performative idiosyncrasies and, as important, their singularly nontraditional beauty, the pair’s casting immediately signals that the director Vincenzo Natali is after something different. With Polley and Brody on board, there’s a chance that despite the big-studio brands on the movie, you’re not headed into genre purgatory with the usual disposable plastic people who often populate (and perish in) mainstream horror. When these two bleed, you might actually care.
That’s a good thing, and it helps explain how Splice delivers for the horror movie fan who has grown weary of being suckered by films that promise new frights only to deliver the same old buckets of gore and guts. Polley and Brody play Clive and Elsa, live-in lovers and rock-star bio-engineers (they’re on the cover of Wired), who are creating new organisms from the DNA of different animals. The money bankrolling them comes from a pharmaceutical outfit, one of those shady corporations that occasionally foot the bill in movies of this sort. Such is the case in The Fly, David Cronenberg’s 1986 film, another cautionary tale about genetic mayhem that Natali appears to have absorbed into his own aesthetic DNA.
The Cronenberg influence here is evident in Natali’s interest in the body and birth and in an initially subdued, near-narcoleptic atmosphere that helps build a nice sense of foreboding. Splice opens with Clive and Elsa ushering their latest entity into the world, an event partly shot from the newborn’s point of view. “He’s so cute,” Elsa says, beaming. The he is a writhing, vaguely penile blob, Fred, which is soon introduced to a second blob, Ginger. (Natali, who wrote the script with Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor, likes his allusions: Clive is most likely a homage to Colin Clive, who played Dr Frankenstein in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, with Elsa Lanchester as the memorably shocked betrothed.)
Although Fred’s point-of-view shot might seem like a throwaway, it’s fundamental to Natali’s design. Point-of-view shots don’t necessarily put you in a character’s (in this case, metaphoric) shoes, but because they let you see what a character sees, allowing you to share his or her perspective, they can create a sense of empathy for the character. In this case, though, empathy with Fred seems less the point than what it is we see through his eyes: Clive and Elsa, fully masked and dressed in laboratory clothes, working in the slightly sickly greenish light of a laboratory bought and paid for by a big company playing at God. This is the vision of Clive and Elsa that Natali wants you to remember, despite all that comes next.
And my, what a lot of unnerving fun comes next, including a spectacular splash of blood, a fall from grace, some true relationship talk and an impulsive, cataclysmically wrongheaded decision. Fred and Ginger, alas, make an abrupt exit, leaving Clive and Elsa close to losing their funds. Inspiration strikes, and a new creature is born, a real doozy that’s initially christened H-50 and, after some growing pains (for everyone), Dren. A sensational, vividly realistic being, Dren is a seamless amalgam of computer-generated effects, mechanical effects and human performance — played as a child by Abigail Chu and as an adult by Delphine Chaneac — that scuttles, slithers and vaults into the horror cinema annals. A mutant is born.
Natali handles Dren’s eerie entrance into the world with near-flawless timing and a thickening air of dread. Working with Robert Munroe (the visual-effects supervisor) and Howard Berger (special makeup and creature effects), Natali has fashioned a creature that, with her tail, skinned-chicken legs and cleft head alternately looks as harmless as a bunny and like something that might leap out from Ridley Scott’s Alien (or, scarier yet, a David Lynch film). Still, for Elsa, Dren is no mere experiment: She’s a test-tube baby, one that comes with the emotional and psychological weight of an in-utero conception. And the bigger Dren gets — she soon grows arms that hug Elsa tight — the deeper the bond between the two and the greater the trouble for Elsa and Clive.
Watching Dren develop — from newt to child to va-va-va-voom adult — you understand why Splice attracted the support of the director Guillermo del Toro, one of its seven executive producers. Natali, whose earlier films include Cube, hasn’t reinvented the horror genre. But with Splice he has done the next best thing with an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics. The shivers might often outweigh the scares, and Natali loses his way in the last half-hour. Yet working with actors who make you care and a neo-Frankenstein creation that touchingly does, too, he has become one of the genre’s new great fright hopes.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would