I've Created A Monster!

In 1998, one of the first DVDs I rented was a film called "Cube". My maiden voyage on the Information Superhighway was still a year away (thanks, Dreamcast!), and I knew nothing about the movie. I just saw the movie at Blockbuster Video, was intrigued by the cover, depicting a rather nervous-looking fellow staring down a red-tinted corridor, and I took it home with me. I watched it over the weekend with my friend, Titus, and we both loved it.

It was a very minimalist movie, taking place in a series of identical rooms differentiated only through lighting. The concept was short and sweet: seven perfect strangers wake up to find themselves in a confusing, seemingly endless maze littered with deadly traps. Why were they chosen? How do they escape? Where the hell are they? What is the purpose of this maze?

What I love about the film is that there are no answers. There are plenty of theories thrown around by various characters in the movie, but we never learn anything definitive. At the film's conclusion, the mysteries of the Cube remain just that.

I know stuff like that infuriates a lot of people. They just hate investing their valuable time in a movie that doesn't hand them the answers. A lot of people just don't want to be challenged.

I'm not calling "Cube" a masterpiece, because it's not. It has its flaws, but it's also a very tense, chilling, and thought-provoking movie. It creates a mystery, but doesn't dwell on "the answers". The film isn't about answers. It's about the mystery. The film is the concept. And I love the concept.

I made sure to remember the name of the film's director: Vincenzo Natali. Clearly, this was a talented, creative guy.

It would be a decade before I saw another Vincenzo Natali film.

Not because the man sat on his laurels for ten years. No, he kept busy enough, even directing a few episodes of the mediocre "Earth: Final Conflict". But the two feature films he directed after "Cube" never opened theatrically in my neck of the woods. To be honest, I didn't even know they existed. I remembered Natali's name, but never bothered to look him up on IMDB, to see what else the man was working on.

Like I said, I saw "Cube" a year before I had access to the Internet, and by the time I was surfing the web, it never even occurred to me to see what Vincenzo Natali was working on, because I had other priorities (56k Porn!) But in 2008, I found a used DVD copy of a film called "Nothing" for 3 bucks at a local supermarket. I recognized the two faces on the cover; they were both in "Cube". And the film was directed by Vincenzo Natali.

Obviously, I took "Nothing" home with me. And I loved it.

I thought "Cube" was minimalist. "Nothing" starts out in a stylized version of the real world, but quickly relocates its characters to a void. Literally a blank slate. In a state of extreme stress, the two leads, Dave and Andrew, literally hate away the world, banishing themselves (and their house) into an endless white expanse.

In time, Dave and Andrew realize that they can hate away anything, including with their hunger, unpleasant memories, and even their hate, itself. Eventually, they piss each other off and start hating away each other's possessions, their entire house, and their bodies. The film ends as the two friends, now disembodied heads, reconcile, alone (yet happy) in their empty world.

It's a terribly creative movie, with some very inventive special effects, considering what must have been a minimal budget. I must admit that I was left rather depressed by the ending, despite the upbeat nature of the characters at the film's conclusion. These two saps are bouncing around an endless void, for fuck's sake! Maybe it's my own baggage, but it didn't seem like a happy ending, to me. I still liked the ending. I'm not the type of guy that needs a happy ending.

I was shocked to notice that "Nothing" was made in 2003. The film had been released five years by the time I got to it. I still haven't seen his other feature film, "Cypher". I don't use Netflix, I stopped renting movies six years ago, and I'm apparently too lazy to order it from Amazon. I will rectify this problem eventually, but for now my irrational hatred of Jeremy Northam keeps me from exposing myself to "Cypher".

Shortly after I watched "Nothing", I began reading about a new movie Vincenzo Natali was working on. A Frankenstein-esque movie about genetic engineers who create a new life-form by combining human DNA with the genetic material of various other animals. It was being produced by Guillermo del Toro. It was called "Splice", and I was intrigued.

Every now and then, I would see some new story on the Internet that revealed a little more about the film. Casting announcements, behind-the-scenes photos, etc. Concept art for the film's creature, called "Dren", surfaced. It looked cool, but I wondered how long I would have to wait to see it.

"Cube" never played in my neighborhood. "Nothing" didn't even exist in my mind until I stumbled upon it used at a supermarket. When would "Splice" finally surface, and when could I get my hands on it? I knew I would have to wait to see it on DVD. It would never open in Wichita.

Then "Splice" played at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It got a huge reaction. Joel Silver bought it for distribution via his "Dark Castle" production shingle at Warner Bros. Then it was announced that "Splice" would get a nationwide theatrical release in June. I couldn't believe it. A Vincenzo Natali film was getting a wide release by a major Hollywood studio. That was cool.

So I waited. Official posters were released. I saw the trailer. I was excited. June 4th couldn't get here quickly enough. And now that "Splice" is playing in theatres nationwide, is it any good?

We'll get there, my friends. All in due time.

"Splice" follows genetic engineers Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), a pair of rebels who work for a big-time Canadian pharmaceutical corporation, splicing together various animal genes to create hybrid lifeforms in order to synthesize some kind of super-protein. The precise nature of this protein is never made clear. Clive and Elsa talk about using their hybrids to help cure various diseases, from Parkinson's disease to some forms of cancer, but it's all vague. And that's fine, because the purpose of the science behind the hybrids isn't important.

Knowing why Clive and Elsa are making monsters isn't truly important. We're not interested in seeing these dipshits cure Parkinson's disease in a movie. We want to see these dipshits cross the line and make a fucking monster. That's why Vincenzo Natali made the movie.

Our heroes unveil their latest creations, a male-and-female pair of sluglike hybrids named "Fred" and "Ginger", which are brimming with this awesome protein, to their superiors. Now these two creatures, which vaguely resemble (to me, anyway) the organic game consoles from David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ", crawl around and make cute little coo-coo noises, entwining their leafy tongues like brazen lovers spending a romantic weekend in Paris. Love is in the air.

Thrilled by their results, but badly in need of a financial windfall, the powers that be decide that Clive and Elsa should change their focus in the lab from creating abominations to synthesizing the protein they have created in their hybrids, in order to finally make some money for their bosses. But that's not what they signed up for. They're rock star genetic engineers, not boring research scientists.

Clive and Elsa decide to take their work to the next level, working in secret to create a new hybrid, based primarily on human DNA. Well, Clive is initially reticent to travel down this road, but Elsa talks him into it. And so it begins. Deep in the bowels of their laboratory, our heroes throw morals and ethics out the window, creating a unique human-hybrid embryo because they can.

Their task accomplished, Clive assumes that Elsa is going to put the embryo on ice for now, because they never discussed allowing the fertilized embryo to develop. But Elsa, who has some serious mommy issues, puts the kibosh on that idea and lets the fetus develop in a robo-womb.

Elsa really wants to see this experiment through to the end, despite Clive's objections. But honestly, it doesn't take much to get Clive to go along with her mad scientist plans. He's a very reluctant partner through the first two thirds of the film, actually. It's rather refreshing to see a genre film where the man is not the gung-ho, "do as I say" driving force behind the plot.

Eventually, the womb spits out a giant, wriggling sperm. Clive shoves it in an incubator and sits up at night, haunted eyes staring into the middle distance. Clearly, the man is conflicted, in a serious "what have we done" sort of way. He wonders if the creature is in pain, and decides to euthanize the thing, just to be sure.

When Clive and Elsa arrive at the lab, the giant sperm is dead. But wait! Elsa turns the sperm over to reveal that it's been hollowed out. She hears something skittering about in the lab. The creature isn't dead; it's just entered a new phase of its life cycle. Now a bipedal bird-like creature with a massive head, Elsa befriends the creature.

Clive still wants to kill it with fire, but he listens to his significant other, deciding to let it live after she explains that the creature is developing at an accelerated rate, and that it will die soon, anyway. Wishful thinking.

So the creature continues to develop into a little asian girl with raptor legs and a prehensile, barbed tail. She demonstrates cognitive thinking, and Elsa is overjoyed, even giving it a name, Dren (which is NERD spelled backwards. Heh heh.) Clive still wants to kill the little raptorbaby, and when it runs a dangerously high fever, he attempts to drown it in the sink.

Luckily, Dren develops the ability to breathe underwater, with her under-developed aquatic lungs. Elsa assumes that Clive knew this when he held Dren underwater, and Clive lets her assume this. But we know better. The man is suffering from some serious post-partum depression.

Clive and Elsa eventually find out that the powers that be have decided to renovate their lab, so they have to find somewhere else to hide their little mistake. Elsa happens to own an old, run-down farmhouse that used to belong to her late, abusive mother. So our heroes smuggle Dren out of the lab in a giant cardboard box, en route to her new home in the middle of nowhere.

I suppose I should mention Clive's brother, here. His name is Gavin, and he works with Clive and Elsa in the lab. That's really all there is to the character. There's never any real attempt made during the film to develop Gavin as a character. He's just there, with his long-stringy hair and his bulbous eyes. Suspicious of his brother's secretive work, he really only exists in the film to provide a conflict for the final act. The Gavin character is one aspect of the film that really falters, and it's disappointing.

Natali should have just combined Gavin with Barlow, Clive and Elsa's boss (played by Natali film regular, David Hewlett). Neither character is given much to do in the film, until the climax requires a body count. But at least David Hewlett is a competent actor. The fellow who plays Gavin (Brandon McGibbon) has a blank expression and resembles Martin Starr from "Freaks and Geeks". Except that Martin Starr has some semblance of screen presence.

Instead of just breaking down the rest of the story, I'm going to focus on five memorable events in the second half of the film, before discussing the climax. Here we go...

Moment One

Clive and Elsa are tasked by their bosses to unveil Fred & Ginger at a big corporate fundraiser. This sounds simple enough. Who wouldn't love to see two cute little slugs in love? But things go hilariously wrong. Fred & Ginger are revealed in a glass aquarium, seperated by a sliding glass wall. The press goes nuts, snapping lots of photos and loudly mumbling, as they are wont to do.

But when the sliding glass partition is removed, the usually docile Fred & Ginger decide to fuck each other to death with spikes that protrude from their faces. It seems that ladyslug Ginger has pulled a Chastity Bono, and now full of testosterone, s/he no longer cares for her/his male companion.

While our heroes look on in horror, Fred & Ginger reduce each other to a fine red paste in the aquarium, which eventually topples over, splashing everyone in the first three rows of the audience with blood and hybrid animal chunks. Worst Gallagher concert ever? Or best Gallagher concert ever? I personally lean toward the latter.

Moment Two

Shortly after arriving on the farm, Dren, now a full-grown (sexy?) raptorlady, escapes from her "parents" and wanders out into the forest. After several frantic minutes of searching, Clive and Elsa find Dren crouched near a tree, facing away from them. Thinking she may be injured, our heroes approach Dren, concerned. But when Dren turns around, we find that the so-called vegetarian monster is vigorously chewing on a dead rabbit, her face covered in blood.

Clive and Elsa are shocked, and Dren gives her mommy and daddy a cute, "did I do something wrong?" grin. It's a very funny moment, and it manages to humanize Dren a fair bit. She was just hungry, after all.

Moment Three

Earlier, Elsa discovered that Dren was keeping a cat as a companion in her farmhouse prison, so Elsa took Dren's little pet away in an act of petty cruelty. Later, feeling bad, Elsa decides to return the cat to Dren.

Pissed off, Dren decides she doesn't want the cat anymore, impaling it with her barbed tail while staring at Elsa with a "fuck you, mom" look on her face. After getting violent with Elsa, Dren attempts to escape and is crowned with a shovel for her trouble.

When she comes to, Dren is strapped to a table, and Elsa surgically removes the poisonous barb in her tail using a local anesthetic. While mutilating Dren, Elsa acts cold and detached, ignoring Dren's painful cries. Only later does Elsa show any remorse for her actions.

During this sequence, Elsa inadvertantly became a shadow of her abusive mother, shutting herself off emotionally while abusing her own child, and later expressing disgust and self-loathing when realizing that she is capable of the same violent behavior as the mother she has tried to distance herself from in her adult life.

You could certainly argue that Elsa was justified in her actions. After all, Dren was demonstrating violent behavior, and her barbed tail could be highly dangerous, but Elsa's methods for "de-clawing" Dren were rather barbaric. It's a very effective scene.

Moment Four

Shortly after relocating Dren to the farmhouse, Dren attempts to escape, climbing onto the roof of the farmhouse. Clive and Elsa follow her, and are amazed to see that Dren has developed small, delicate wings that protrude from her arms. Preparing to fly away, Clive tells Dren not to go, because they love her. Hearing these words, Dren runs into Clive's arms.

Until this moment, Clive has shown at best a tolerance for Dren. He's always been in favor of euthanizing this "mistake", wrestling with the moral and ethical questions of his actions as the co-creator of this new life-form. But when he tells Dren that he loves her on the roof, it's a serious turning point for the character.

Clive no longer sees Dren as a simple experiment, he now sees her as a unique, emotional being. He finally accepts Dren as an individual.

Moment Five

After teaching Dren to dance in an amusing sequence, Clive begins to act strangely. He spies on her via webcam while she swims in the farmhouse. He realizes that Elsa used one of her own ovaries when they created Dren in the lab, and confronts her with this information. Accusing Elsa of being a fucked-up control freak who needed to have a "child" on her own terms, Clive withdraws emotionally.

Clive visits Dren at the farmhouse, and she attempts to seduce him. Clive succumbs to Dren's advances, and a freaky sex scene commences.

This is without a doubt my favorite moment in the film. Not just because I'm a weirdo who enjoys seeing genre films take the plunge into the deep end of the crazy pool. I love this moment because of the way the audience reacted to it.

In a half-full auditorium, two thirds of the audience reacted with some audible variation of "what the fuck?!", and the rest of the audience squirmed in their seats like a nightcrawler in a rainstorm.

A young child seated very close to me (why the fuck are there always young children in these crowds?) initially covered his eyes, then stood up and quickly ran from the theatre, so overcome with emotion that he could no longer stand to be in the presence of this film. Several adults followed, so disgusted that they just couldn't stick it out any longer. They never returned.

Now I honestly can't recall the last time I've seen a movie that bothered somebody so much that they walked out before the credits rolled. Apparently this transgressive moment was so unexpected that a few people just couldn't handle it. They had to get the fuck out. For this reason alone, I will always love "Splice".

Thank you for making a movie that offended people so greatly that they had to hastily exit the theatre before they were offended further. Thank you, Mr. Natali.

Anyway, while Clive and Dren are bumping uglies, Elsa happens to walk into the barn. Clive notices her presence, pulling away from Dren with the "I fucked up" look plastered on his face. Absolutely priceless.

Shortly after Clive's little lapse in judgment, and a very tense argument with Elsa later, Dren's physical condition quickly deteriorates, and she dies. Clive and Elsa mourn, choosing to bury Dren near the farmhouse rather than dissect her corpse. As darkness falls, our heroes gather all of Dren's belongings, burning them in a bonfire.

But the movie can't be over, yet. This is a monster movie, after all. And the film's monster, while occassionally displaying a slight sinister bent, has done little more than eat a rabbit, kill a cat, and have dirty, dirty sex with her father figure.

Up until this point, Dren has been less of a monster, and more of a slightly dangerous child, learning more and more about her world and throwing the occassional tantrum. You didn't really think she was dead, did you?

Clive's brother shows up at the farmhouse, with their boss Mr. Barlow. Earlier in the film, Gavin discovered Dren at the lab, and agreed to keep her existence a secret. He didn't keep that secret for long, and has brought Barlow up to show the man his brother's handiwork.

Clive and Elsa tell Barlow that Dren is already dead, but moments later Barlow is snatched away by a winged apparition, kicking and screaming. They find their boss stuck in a tree, very dead.

A moment later, the surviving trio see a shape atop the barn, sillhouetted in the moonlight. It seems that Dren took a page from Ginger's playbook and has decided to see what life with a penis has to offer. He-Dren stands on the barn, pimped out with manly plumage, looking pissed off.

Poor treacherous Gavin is next on He-Dren's hitlist, carried off deeper into the forest, screaming like a stuck pig. Clive bolts after his brother, and Elsa follows. Unfortunately, Gavin takes the loss, and He-Dren attacks Clive, pulling him into a frigid pond and knocking him out.

He-Dren straddles Elsa, ripping her clothes. She asks him what he wants, and He-Dren Zuul's out the words "Inside you..." before he rapes his mother with his tail/dick. Clive stabs his very naughty child with a big stick, and Elsa smacks him upside the head with a large rock.

Elsa raises the rock, poised to crush her child's head with the rock, but He-Dren makes eye contact with his mother, distracting her just long enough to stab Clive in the heart with his deadly tail barb, which has regenerated. Elsa finally crushes He-Dren's face with the rock, and the sadness begins.

If Elsa hadn't hesitated, her man would still be alive. While He-Dren and Elsa were staring each other down, Natali even cuts away to a shot of Clive on his back, staring at Elsa, with a "what the fuck are you waiting for?" look in his eyes. It's a shame, really. Sure, Clive made a few mistakes, but in the end he was a decent guy. He didn't deserve his fate.

Overall, the film's climax veers toward the more standard monster movie formula, with Dren losing any sympathetic qualities in his/her gender switch, becoming a pretty traditional antagonist.

Of course, this situation has been set up earlier in the film with Ginger's sexual reorientation and violent reaction toward male Fred. Dren and Ginger are similar creatures, the only genetic difference being the introduction of human DNA in Dren. So when Dren becomes a male, it's only natural for him to act overly aggressive to any other males he encounters. His behavior is not unprecedented.

That certainly makes it easier to forgive some of the flaws in the climax. The film didn't cheat to create the final conflict between Dren and his/her creators. It certainly works in context, although I have read several reviews that think the film simply falls apart at this point. It does become a bit by-the-numbers, but I don't think it falls apart, at all.

Dren rapes his mother, for fuck's sake! There's nothing by-the-numbers about that. I did miss the more sympathetic, more three-dimensional female Dren in the finale. She was easy on the eyes, that's for sure. Aside from that, it's a fine way to wrap up the main story.

Dren had a serious Oedipus complex.

The film finally ends with Elsa at a meeting with the CEO of the pharmaceutical company, signing away the rights to her rapidly developing fetus. That's right! Dren knocked up his mom! She's going to give birth to her own grandchild. And it will be the property of a powerful pharmaceutical corporation. Roll credits.

"Splice" is a fantastic movie. Like in his previous films, Vincenzo Natali has focused more on a very small cast of characters, allowing the viewer to get to know the principle characters very well, so that when the shit hits the fan in the climax, the viewer actually cares about what happens to these people.

I've heard people describe Elsa and Clive as "rock stars", because they prefer to dress in a more trendy fashion, they listen to techno music and jazz when they work, and they were on the cover of "Wired" magazine. I didn't get that from these characters. They seemed more like hipster nerds, to me.

They're trying to give off this "too cool for school" attitude, and it never rings true for me. Their apartment is decked out with all of this manga-influenced artwork, and it feels like they're just eccentric geeks desperately trying to project the "rock star" vibe.

It's all a case of arrested development. They're really immature people, in many ways. They surround themselves with all of these childish trappings, and they act like rebellious teenagers who won't be pigeonholed by "the man". Clive and Elsa briefly discuss the possibility of having children early on, but it doesn't go anywhere. When they bring Dren into the world, essentially their child, it's clear that these two are simply unfit parents.

Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley really throw themselves into their roles, and they each do a great job. You really feel Clive's ambivalent attitude toward the experiment during the first half of the film, continually ceding to Elsa's wishes despite his objections to the whole endeavor. And Sarah Polley manages to play Elsa as a damaged woman, severely affected by her rough upbringing, without ever making it distracting. The woman understands subtext.

I do have a problem with Sarah Polley, but it's completely superficial. The first film I saw Sarah Polley in was 1989's "The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen". She was only 10 years old in that film, and she had really small teeth and very large gums. I was very distracted by that.

But she was just a child. Those were her baby teeth. Most kids have teeth like that. Surely when she grew up, her teeth would not remain the same.

21 years later, her teeth look exactly the same. Tiny teeth, large gums. It still looks weird, and it's still distracting. But that's not Sarah Polley's fault, and I don't hold it against her. It's just a small hang-up on my part.

Delphine Chaneac is the real star of this movie. Her performance as the adult Dren is stunning. She effortlessly conveys child-like innocence, adult sexuality, and predatory menace at times within the same sequence, and it's completely believable. She is assisted by some smooth digital effects work, extending the distance between her eyes, lengthening her fingers, and replacing her legs with bird-like appendages.

But without Chaneac's amazing performance, none of these effects would mean a damned thing. She makes Dren a character you care about, and she manages to do this without ever speaking. Her performance is completely physical, and it's just a shame that she'll probably never be recognized by the masses for her extraordinary work.

The special effects in general, both the digital work and the physical effects work, are exemplary. I understand why it took nearly two years after the film was shot for the effects work to be completed. The digital work is almost seamless. There are a few moments where it falters, most notably whenever Dren's wings unfurl, but I was so invested in the film that it never became an issue for me. I can't praise the effects work enough.

The completely digital, non-humanoid baby Dren, with a close physical resemblance to a velociraptor, is actually very cute and endearing. The sound design helps, with baby Dren's labored breathing sounding suspiciously like that of a sleeping human infant. When baby Dren is sleeping, I just wanted Elsa to wrap her in a blanket and sing her a lullaby.

Even the almost-completely featureless Fred & Ginger, two amorphous slug creatures, become sympathetic early on, thanks to a combination of brilliant choices by the effects artists and sound designers. Even though the sequence was incredibly funny, I did feel a little sad when Fred & Ginger chose to destroy each other in the aquarium. Poor Fred never saw it coming.

"Splice" is not a perfect movie. But it's so odd, so cool, and so fucking transgressive at times, that I can't help but unabashedly love it. Movies like this simply aren't made, anymore. And if they are, they're usually relegated to Direct-To-DVD Hell. The fact that "Splice" was given a nationwide theatrical release is a miracle.

I'm glad I saw "Splice" in theatres. I think I might see it again this weekend. You should see it, too. You might love it, you might hate it, but it will certainly stick with you long after the credits roll.

I'll be back later this week to talk about the other two films I saw this weekend, "Get Him To The Greek" and "Killers". Here's a hint: I liked one, and hated the other. Guess which is which?

Find out whenever I motivate myself to type another long, rambling post. Probably Thursday.