There are horror movies that scare you straight, while others scare you with a sense of humor, a kind of twinkle in their eye.  Watching Splice, the new sci-fi horror from the director of 1997’s word-of-mouth hit Cube, you get the idea that the aim is to create a dark, moody, straight-forward horror thriller.  Unfortunately, there are moments that go completely the other way and the combination just doesn’t work.

The story revolves around a romantically-entangled pair of biogenetic scientists who have created a pair of creatures by splicing together the DNAs of a few different species.  Their creation might just prove the cure for a number of human diseases, but they want more.  When told they cannot take the next step—mixing in human DNA—they go ahead and do it anyway.  Clive and Elsa are rebellious scientists, after all.  We know so because of their somewhat eclectic wardrobes.

Their creation is named Dren.  She looks sort of like a human, but with backward bent legs and a vicious stinger at the end of her tail.  As she ages at a rate fifty times faster her human counterparts, Clive and Elsa raise Dren as if she were their own daughter.  In order to hide her from the rest of the world, they move her to an old abandoned farm.  If for no other reason, this allows the filmmakers to work in scenes in classic horror venues: the spooky woods, the old barn, the ghostly house.

It’s a good setup and this movie had me going for most of its first half, but it is at that point that the filmmakers really tried to push the envelope.  It’s commendable if it works, but unfortunately the result was some scenes that drew laughs that would make guys like Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell jealous.  Unfortunately, whereas audiences would be laughing with Sandler and Ferrell, they are laughing at the work of director Vincenzo Natali and his co-writer Antoinette Terry Bryant.

It’s not a total wrong turn.  There is a bloody press conference scene that is fun in its over-the-topness without ruining the mood of the movie.  There’s another scene in which one of the leads went all mad scientist on us that is also clever.  Too bad those moments are completely overshadowed by what follows.  It’s not even so much the specific scene but the attempt to explain it that pushes Splice into the land of the ludicrous and the goofy.

Aside from the turn into unintended humor, the movie also struggles with being a little too predictable and convenient.  There’s a plot twist near the end that only the characters in the story seemed to be surprised by and a final reveal that might have been shocking had it not been a foregone conclusion. The biggest surprise of the movie may be the move to the farm at the midpoint because it comes completely out of the blue.  Need a spooky setting for the second half of your horror movie?  Hey, I have a farm!

Some of the creature effects that show up in the second half of the film are also pretty cheesy and they just add to the weight that brings Splice down after a promising first half.  The end result is too cheesy to be a serious scare-fest, but not cheesy enough to enter so-bad-it’s-good territory.

Splice is rated R for “disturbing elements including strong sexuality, nudity, sci-fi violence and language.”  This movie definitely gets pretty graphic in the second half, thus warranting the R rating.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of Splice.