Splice

Clive and Elsa, romantically involved celebrity scientists (played by Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) have been mixing multiple animal DNA in order to create strange mutant creatures. When they throw some human DNA into the mix, the resultant creature is an animal-human hybrid named Dren, and she just might kill you. Splice invades this bland summer movie season like an insane, confused partygoer told she was attending a Halloween masquerade ball rather than a friendly barbecue. Vincenzo Natali’s movie takes an inquisitive look at the boundaries and barriers that have made horror films so bland and routine in recent years and then blasts those roadblocks with steel-tipped boots and sledgehammers. This is the sort of movie I would expect to go straight to video, not because it isn’t a good movie, but because mainstream audiences generally aren’t expected to handle horrific material like this.