Man, let me tell you. My batting average for quality cinema choices has been pretty dismal lately. There are a few that aren’t even worth mentioning. Then there was Tusk, which I shat all over a few days ago, asking myself, could it get any worse?

SPLICE is the movie that pulled itself up out of its reclining chair, like your drunk uncle, farted, and said, “Hold my beer.”

Alternative titles for the Splice:

Weird Man-Made Penis Creatures (kudos to my friend Nkomo for this one.)

Mutant Baby Hermaphrodite – How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On The Farm?

The short story is that two scientists go rogue with a gene-splicing experiment, and since it’s Hollywood (or maybe somewhere in Canada for this one), they cant get away from a suspiciously Religious-Right narrative that scientists should never mess with genes nor artificial intelligence (nor any fucking thing)! That always makes me wonder, and I’ve written about this before. The Ultra-Right Usually-Christian Junta is always complaining about Liberal Elites in Hollywood, but Hollywood rarely portrays the realm of science outside a TOWER OF BABEL context. But the long story is that all the elements existed here for a relatively good science fiction film.

The plot itself didn’t start out bad. The sub-plots were clever enough, particularly the one about the woman who’d had a very conflicted relationship with a controlling, manipulative mother. There’s a workaholic couple whose sex-life suffers. There’s the pressure from the shareholders to push ahead with experiments to build up the bottom line. Okay, nothing original. We’ve seen it all before. But then we even had a recent Oscar winner with Adrien Brody, who I’m assuming owed someone somewhere a lot of money or a big favor. Now I’m going to list what was wrong.

• bad writing
• bad acting
• bad directing
• bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

So with that I’m going to leave it with one last alternative title which pretty much sums up how fucking terrible Splice is:

Mutant Love Triangle.

Good night.