There is a very short list of filmmakers who are so perfectly in tune with my sensibilities, so completely on my wavelength, that each of their projects threatens to collapse my critical faculties and reduce me to a drooling, adoring mess. One such person is little-known Canadian director Vincenzo Natali, whose enigmatic sci-fi mind-blowers Cube and Cypher were about as far up my alley as you could go before it starts to hurt. (I haven't seen Nothing yet, but I will soon.) So I've been hungrily devouring every morsel of information about his upcoming Splice, which is about a pair of scientists (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) who discover a way to create new kinds of creatures in the lab by splicing DNA, and then go and introduce human genes into the experiment. My squeamishness about genetic horrors (no joke: I consider Cronenberg's The Fly to be the scariest movie I've ever seen) and my affinity for Natali's approach makes me think this one could really do a number on me.
There hasn't been much in the way of big breaking news about Splice, but I'll take what I can get. Entertainment Weekly recently ran a photo from the film, a full version of which you can find here thanks to the good folks at Giant Freakin' Robot. It's hard to tell if Polley is trying to shove Brody's hand into some sort of mad scientist tub, or if something's bitten it and she's trying to pull it out. Either way, all does not seem well. And in a possible one-step-forward-two-steps-back development, Variety recently reported that Splice has been picked up for distribution in North America by Senator Entertainment, which last summer bought the wonderful All the Boys Love Mandy Lane from the Weinsteins but has yet to let it see the light of day. With any luck, we'll be able to see Splice sometime in 2009. I am considering attempting to hibernate until then.
