Splice - **

Splice is one of those horror movies that is much more interesting when you don't look at it as a horror movie. It's got a pretty neat premise about a nature vs. nurture experiment gone too far, which is handled well for about forty-five minutes, at which point someone told the filmmakers that because the film shares similarities with other horror films, it should conform to all of the pitfalls of the genre. And so what starts out as an emotionally-grounded film with a strange premise turns into a dreadful exercise in gross-out CGI-driven mayhem featuring a strong candidate for worst line of the year... "What do you want?!" screams the female scientist creator of the Winged, Knife-Tailed, Gender-Switching Demon Who Can Breathe Under Water, to which WK-TG-SDWCBUW chokes out, "Inside... You!" But at that point, you don't really care if the Female Scientist gets raped by a demon knife-tail, or anything else on screen... you just want to be Outside... The Theater.