Splice

Vincenzo Natali’s modern monster movie isn’t quite the subversive midnight-friendly romp it might have been, but transgenderism, incest and bestiality all at once has to count for something. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley are two fetching young geneticists who, against corporate orders and against nature, become the proud yet also ashamed parents of a little baby rodent-bird-amphibian-arthropod girl. With help from Howard Berger’s excellent special effects, she grows into a mutant sexpot (Delphine Chanéac), proving the combination of mad science and bad parenting to be quite fertile. Brody and Polley remain impressively undaunted by all the confused instincts, Freudian eruptions and other karmic consequences that Natali and his co-writers Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor manage to hurl at them. Still, leaving no trope unturned means not giving any enough consideration. In its final act, Splice seems to have hemorrhaged all inspiration, and finally just trudges to an obligatory bore of an action climax.