It is somewhat appropriate that this is a Canadian film as it draws heavily on David Cronenberg's body horror films of the 1980s, in particular Shivers and Rabid with Frankenstein, a film that Vincenzo Natali says influenced him a great deal, along with news footage of a mouse with a human ear growing on its back.

As she grows older, increasingly powerful and more self-aware, Dren becomes a fully sexualised female who begins to look at Clive in a very different way from when she was a child and, with Elsa almost treating her as a surrogate daughter, what happens next is extremely unpredictable and disturbing. However, his brother (who also works at the laboratory) found out about Dren so Clive must try and keep him quiet whilst he gets things under control and can see out the inspections going on which threaten to shut down the labratory in which they work. When Clive demands information about the creature and what is going on between her and Elsa, she points out what it can do and even gives it a name, Dren (which she makes up on the spot by looking at the upside down spelling of NERD).īecause keeping Dren a secret in the laboratory becomes increasingly difficult, Elsa divulges that she has access to a farmhouse in the country and they transport Dren to a barn which they turn into a home for her with Elsa phoning in sick so she can stay with Dren whilst Clive goes to the laboratory and pretends that it is business as usual. Although it can't talk, Elsa tries to communicate with it using Scrabble letters and is amazed to find that it actually responds and, when she points to her T-shirt and says 'Elsa', the creature moves the letters to spell NERD, the acronym for the company for which she works which is written on her T-shirt. As the creature grows and ages at an incredible rate from a baby into a child, it grows arms, a long and powerful tail with a stinger on the end and seems to be extremely intelligent. Discovering a strange creature in the laboratory with two legs, no arms and a disproportionately large head, Clive wants to kill the strange (and illegal due to it's human component) new organism but Elsa is drawn to the creature and, by removing her gas mask, prevents Clive from gassing the room. Believing it dead they leave it but, on closer examination the next day, it is found to have been just be a shell with evidence that the foetus actually came to term and was born.

The embryo's growth is rapid and, months ahead of schedule, there are complications and they are forced to 'deliver' the new baby. This changes when Elsa tries a new method which is successful, but rather than terminate the experiment as Clive wants, she starts to artificially grow the new species. Of course, the funding body wants nothing to do with this leap into the dark and is quite happy with the progress they have made up to now but the two geneticists decide to carry on their research in private and begin introducing DNA from a human donor into their creation, all of which fail. They, especially Elsa, want to go a step further and merge this creature (there are two of them which they have named Fred and Ginger) with human DNA in order to potentially create the Holy Grail for scientists with something that would be able to cure Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and various forms of cancer. They have already managed to splice parts of various animals' DNA to build a new unique organism which itself is helping provide a cure for an animal disease. Splice follows two geneticists, Clive and Elsa, who are a couple with extreme ambitions.

Therefore I had to wait until it was available to rent or buy or, which was fortunate, sent to me for review. This is a real pity but, let's face it, Cineworld, Odeon or Vue would rather show a family friendly film about an animated dog than a potentially interesting horror film directed by the guy who brought us Cube and with Guillermo del Toro acting as the executive producer. I saw the trailer and read about Splice some time ago and was looking forward to seeing it at the cinema but, as is increasingly the case with the homogenised world of multiplex cinema chains, it wasn't shown.

Splice 2 dvd