Some Things You Can't Unsee

I went to see Splice with a bunch of my friends this weekend and the reactions were... mixed.

*SPOILERS WITHIN*

In case you didn't know, Splice is a sci-fi film about two of the worlds worst scientists who create a new species by splicing human and animal DNA. The experiment is meant to yield breakthroughs in the medical field but instead they become attached to the specimen and fuck everyone over.

This film is unique in the sense that it jumps bridges that most films nowadays are too scared to lose an audience over. Like the scene where Clyde (the male lead scientist played by Adrien Brody) has sex with the goddamned specimen. That's right, they do it. As I was watching this perfectly disturbing and yet convincingly understandable turn of events my thoughts were: Holy shit, this movie is fucking fantastic.

My friends thoughts were more along the lines of: Oh dear lord, what the hell man? WHAT THE HELL?!

After watching this movie, I started thinking about what made me see this film differently from everyone else. We all left realizing the things we had seen were surely fucked but only myself and one other friend left in appreciation. Everyone else was filled with disgust and just plain shocked. I was eventually able to convince everyone that their broken state of mind was proof that even though the film may not have been to their liking, it was effective and therefore successful.

My friend and I are definitely the bigger movie buffs of the group and we have both seen our fair share of the abnormal, grotesque and flat-out bat-shit crazy. So it's possible that we've become desensitized to dismissing a film as mediocre when it makes our brains sad.

I totally understand why my friends found this to be crappy maybe even funny-- in a really perverse way-- that doesn't mean I agree. This is a movie that crosses too many lines of morality to be counted here and it's amazing for it. Yet this film still holds truth to why Hollywood studios are afraid to take risks with their movies. This was a great sci-fi film and yet it's made $7.4 million as far as this weekend goes. That's a total bomb. At least it will most likely live on in the hearts of many sci-fi geeks and film enthusiasts as a cult-classic.

Possible sequels are being planned and as this usually goes, they'll probably be straight-to-DVD. Now that's really gross.