Gene Genie.

Y’know, I didn’t watch SPLICE for the raunchy interspecies sex scenes – but I’m not complaining…

A gene-spliced organism causes havoc for the two scientists who created it, due to the organism’s predatory nature and the way it was created with the unethical splicing of human genes… but mostly because it looks like a hot naked French model.

If SPECIES was ALIEN with a spectacular set of knockers, SPLICE is SPECIES with a barely-legal set of tennis ball ta-tas.

Clive and Elsa (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) are two geneticists funded to try and create a new life form through gene-splicing experiments. They succeed with a couple of squishy organisms that resemble giant flaccid penises. Emboldened, Elsa takes it one step further by splicing human genes with a few different animals to create a disturbing two-legged thing that scrabbles about like a rat-bird. Bizarre design coupled with excellent creature effects makes this rat-bird scary with its alienness.

Elsa names it Dren and they keep the organism under wraps as it grows, because the experiment used human genes without their lab’s consent or authorization. A few weeks later, Dren is the size of a small girl, Elsa treating it like a daughter, putting a blue dress on “her” – yet Dren retains satyr-like feet jointed like a goat, a tail, eyes spaced too far apart and a nervous attitude suggesting some kind of reptile; disturbingly human, but not quite human – just like a Republican.

Dren grows into part-spinner, part-diamond dog; by now she is being played by French model Delphine Chanéac, shaved-headed, mute, tailed and sniffing around at everything in curiosity, wearing a slinky black dress that almost conspires with us in threatening to reveal thigh-high hybrid vag. In other words – hotter than hell. She matures enough to realize she is being kept from the outside world – held prisoner – in an isolated barn.

And then all Dren breaks loose…

SPLICE could have asked innumerable sociological and ethical questions, could have gone in many different plot directions, but it chose to stay Genetic Lite and stick to a simple plot of Dren’s development and burgeoning transsexuality. Still, it’s a unique film, a sign of our scientific times and hopefully a step towards more stem cell research – to create hot chicks with tails.

Sarah Polley does her annoying Julianne Moore Lite, which, I am presuming, is the reason Adrien Brody was driven into the alien embrace of the diamond-thighed Dren. It’s a golden sex scene. But so much more: like SPECIES, the writers of SPLICE drive home the point that living organisms exist to mate. The peanut-brained gallery won’t get it though, because any sex scene that hot, they will maintain, is purely for prurient reasons. And they would be right. Without prurience, how does any organism get up the gumption to mate in the first place and continue their species?

I do not know, but I aim to find out with thorough scientific research. So I went back and re-watched that sex scene on the DVD again. And again… and again. And just one more time.

Thorough scientific research.

END