profoundly moving

In cinemas next week is Splice, the long-awaited new collaboration between Vincenzo Natali (Cube) and Guillermo del Toro.

Adrian Brody stars as Clive, a hotshot young genetic engineer who unwittingly creates a terrifying new species. Ha! You see? This is exactly the kind of thing President Bush was trying to warn us about. You let these speccy little stem cell weirdos run riot and they’ll go and build some kind of horrendous, multi-limbed, homosexual, liberal monster who hates us for our freedom.

There’s quite a lot of fairly repulsive shit in this film (at several points during the screening, my friend Ed leant over to whisper “that is literally your girlfriend!” while jabbing me excitedly in the ribs). First up is this old fellow..

..which apparently is an incredible new hybrid set to revolutionise medical science. It mainly looks like a combination of a penis, a doner kebab and a human poo.

When Clive and his partner Elsa (Sarah Polley) combine it with human DNA, they produce DREN – a strange and wonderful new creature with a keen intelligence and superhuman strength. And gills. And kangaroo legs. And it can fly. And has a tail that can kill people.

And it’s kind of a bit fit.

Clive and Sarah become surrogate parents to this strange being whose personality alternates between a beguiling childlike innocence and malevolent violence. As they struggle to keep their creation hidden from the authorities, they must also face up to the profound ethical questions its existence raises: is it the animal part of DREN’S DNA that makes it a monster, or the human part? Do we need moral limitations to scientific discovery? Just because we can does it necessarily mean that we should?

More pressing than any of those however, the question on everyone’s lips, is obviously.. is or isn’t Adrian Brody going to have sex with it at some point?

The answer to that, I’m afraid, is yes.