The Bombs of Barbra

Among the many problems critics cited with the 1976 remake of A Star is Born—and they cited a bunch of them at the time—was the preposterousness of Barbra Streisand’s Lite FM pop winning over hard rock audience (mitigating factor: the rocker in question was played by country singer Kris Kristofferson). To Barbra’s fans, however, this makes perfect sense. How could anyone not be won over by one of the most talented women of our time? Her fans were sold—I certainly was—and so A Star is Born became another one of Barbra’s many hit films and another fuck you to her critics.

But Barbra’s fans didn’t line up for everything she did. Though most of Barbra’s films were successful—her track record is pretty impressive—she did have a few bombs. So, while Barbra’s successes are being celebrated in the wake of her recently published door stopper of a memoir My Name is Barbra (also a hit), I thought I’d revisit her few failures, which is far easier—and faster—than reviewing that autobiography. (Nine-hundred and ninety-two pages? Oh, fuck no.) 

I’m going to bypass Hello, Dolly!, which, similar to Cleopatra, was both a box office hit (No. 5 on the list of top grossing movies for 1969) and a financial disappointment (i.e., it cost too goddamn much to make), though 20th Century Fox, as it did with Cleopatra, eventually recouped its investment. Instead, I’m jumping to Barbra’s first real flop, UP THE SANDBOX.

Margaret joins the other moms in Central Park.

Up the Sandbox just might be the closest Barbra ever got to making a small arthouse film. In this 1972 adaptation of Anne Roiphe’s 1970 novel, Barbra plays Margaret, a young New York housewife, married to a college professor (David Selby) who regularly escapes her stifling existence through vivid fantasies. Sometimes the fantasies are dark (joining a group of activists to blow up the Statue of Liberty), but most are played for laughs (Margaret pushing her nagging mother’s face into a birthday cake; increasing her breast size at will during a college faculty party).

Margaret's mother (Jane Hoffman) fights back.

Fidel Castro (Jocobo Morales) has a secret.

It's not a perfect film. The feminist messaging is a little too on-the-nose, some of the humor hasn’t aged well (“Oh, my god, you’re a fag.”), and its conclusion isn’t entirely satisfying, but I still count Up the Sandbox among my favorite Barbra Streisand films. It’s certainly one of Barbra’s best performances. One of Barbra’s stumbling blocks as an actress, especially in more dramatic roles, is she can’t let us forget she’s Barbra Streisand, so her performances are always bigger than the character she’s playing. She also tends to be too self-conscious, unable to pick up a glass of water without making sure she’s showing off her manicure (as any Barbra fan knows, Babs just loves showing off her nails on camera). It’s like director Irvin Kershner (the same one who directed this little sci-fi gem) told her to do what she usually does, just 10-15% less of it—and for once she trusted the director. As a result, she gives one of her most relaxed, natural performances.

Margaret prepares to blow up the Statue of Liberty, a scene
Barbra says likely would not be included were the film made today.

Margaret journeys to Africa with musicologist Dr. Beineke 
(Paul Benedict), but the natives are less than welcoming.

Too bad not a whole lot of people saw it. Reportedly audiences at the time were put off by how the fantasies were introduced. Instead of doing the standard harps and swirling dissolves to announce fantasy sequences, Kershner lets them happen organically, as if they are part of Margaret’s reality. It’s usually pretty easy to tell when a scene has segued into fantasy, but apparently this confused 1972 audiences, which hurt word of mouth. (Christopher Nolan would have had a very different career trajectory if he started making films in the early 1970s.)

Paul (David Selby) and Margaret get real.

The movie’s box office was further hurt by the fact that it is difficult to categorize. In the movie’s DVD commentary, Barbra describes the movie as “a drama with some laughs”—so, a dramedy. But the movie was marketed as a straight-up comedy, with a painting of Barbra, pregnant and looking startled, tied to a giant baby bottle. I like the poster, but it’s selling a wacky comedy like What’s Up, Doc?, released earlier the same year, not “a drama with some laughs.” The trailer didn’t help matters. As we’ll soon see, this won’t be the last time mis-marketing helped tank one of Barbra’s movies.

Did it deserve to bomb? No. It’s definitely worth seeking out if you’re a Streisand fan. Even if you’re not, you might still want to check it out as it’s not a typical Streisand film. It’s available for streaming. Those who prefer physical media will have to be content with a DVD, but if you go that route avoid Barbra’s commentary track, which adds little beyond proving she’s as self-absorbed as her detractors say she is.

‘A Little, European Kind of Film’

If there was any justice in the world, the next movie on this list would be 1979’s The Main Event, which I think is Barbra’s worst movie (for her co-star, the late Ryan O’Neal, worst was yet to come), but, no, The Main Event made money. Instead, Barbra’s second bomb detonated in 1981 with the release of the non-com ALL NIGHT LONG.

George Dupler (Gene Hackman) and Chery (you know who)
enjoy dinner at sunset.

All Night Long was originally meant to be a modest little comedy about George Dupler, a middle-aged exec for a drugstore chain who, after reacting violently to being passed over for a promotion, gets demoted to night manager of one of the company’s 24-hour stores. George then begins having an affair with the wife of his fourth cousin, Cheryl, who is also having an affair with George’s son Freddie (got all that?). Gene Hackman was cast as George, and Lisa Eichorn as Cheryl. It was the American debut of Belgian director Jean-Claude Tramont.

Gene Hackman wonders what the fuck happened
to his movie.

Unfortunately for the movie, Tramont was married to ’70s superagent Sue Mengers. Mengers represented Hackman, but her biggest client was Barbra Streisand. Mengers had wanted Barbra in the role of Cheryl from the beginning, but Barbra, then busily trying to get Yentl off the ground, passed. This didn’t stop Mengers, who began badmouthing Eichorn’s performance the moment she saw the early rushes (other people connected to the film said Eichorn was fine). Mengers’ behind the scenes fuckery is detailed fully in Brian Kellow’s biography of Mengers, Can I Go Now? (or you could just read an excerpt here), but the TL;DR version is that Mengers got Barbra to reconsider with a very persuasive $4 million payday, got Eichorn fired, and transformed her husband’s low-stakes project into A Barbra Streisand Film.

Loni Anderson says she was considered for the role Cheryl but was
beat out by Barbra. However, the one source I found that even mentions
Anderson in connection with this movie reports she was considered after 
Barbra initially turned the part down, meaning she lost the role to Lisa Eichorn.
Either way, she dodged a bullet (only to catch a much bigger bullet).

The 2004 DVD cover is closer
to the tone of the movie, but still
misses the mark. Also, did they
give Barbra a Photoshop nose job?

Except, All Night Long wasn’t A Barbra Streisand Film; Barbra was a co-star in a Gene Hackman film (All Night Long was the first time she got second billing). That didn’t stop Universal’s publicity department from making Barbra the focus of its marketing. “She’s got a way with men, and she’s getting away with it… All Night Long,” reads the poster’s tagline. Muddying the waters further is the accompanying art featuring Barbra sliding down a fireman’s pole with her skirt flying up à la Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, with Hackman, Dennis Quaid (as Freddie) and Kevin Dobson (as Cheryl’s hot-headed fireman husband Bobby) waiting below to catch her. A rollicking sex farce starring Barbra Streisand? This movie looks fun!

All Night Long is not a rollicking sex farce. It’s not that fun, or that funny. “It was really a little, European kind of film,” is how Barbra described it in Can I Go Now? She said she “felt totally betrayed” by the movie’s misleading ad campaign. Audiences also felt betrayed, and the movie quickly sank at the box office, making just under $4.5 million against its $15 million budget.

Dennis Quaid might actually be stoned in this scene.

All Night Long isn’t that funny, but it isn’t unwatchable, either. I’d describe it as a neutered Middle-Age Crazy or a second-rate Starting Over. It’s a direct-to-video movie before those were a thing. Barbra, wearing a Rona Barrett wig and push-up bras, manages to pull off the role of ditzy suburban cougar Cheryl, and it’s fun to see her play against type. Unfortunately, Cheryl isn’t a character so much as she is a collection of quirky behaviors: she rides a scooter; she has a love of the color lavender so obsessive that even her cigarettes are that color; she meticulously picks the raisins out of a cinnamon raisin Danish because she read somewhere you shouldn’t eat fruit and carbs together. In fact, most of the laughs Cheryl gets hinge on the fact that she’s played by Barbra Streisand, such as a scene in which Cheryl, composing a country song on an electric organ, proves to be a lousy singer, which got the movie’s biggest laugh when I saw it in the theater (I’m old, y’all!) Would this scene have worked if Lisa Eichorn was in the role of Cheryl? Probably, but the laughs likely wouldn’t have been as loud.

These alternate poster designs I whipped up aren’t masterpieces of 
graphic design, but they better convey the tone of All Night Long than
what Universal came up with. I made Gene Hackman's character the
focus, while Barbra is featured but not emphasized. The lazier design
on the right also makes it clear that Barbra is not the main character,
though I’m sure anyone presenting such a design in 1981 would be fired
on the spot. Sue Mengers and Barbra might even have the designer killed.

But most of the characters in All Night Long are underwritten, reduced to types rather than fully realized people, with only Hackman’s George getting fleshed out to any degree. In fact, the whole movie plays out like they were working from screenwriter W.D. Richter’s first draft. In addition to underdeveloped characters, there’s a satirical undercurrent about suburban malaise and the so-called American Dream that's never fully realized, either because Richter’s script never quite articulated it or Tramont never quite grasped it. In the end, All Night Long didn’t need Barbra to save it, it just needed rewrites.

Did it deserve to bomb? Yes, if only as an expensive middle finger to Mengers, who should’ve minded her own fucking business. (Mengers got an even bigger middle finger when Barbra dropped her as her agent shortly after. As for Tramont, he died in 1996 with only one other American directing credit, the TV movie As Summers Die.) I don’t dislike the movie—it’s way more watchable than The Main Event—but it’s hardly essential viewing. 

Cheryl enjoys one of her lavender-tinted cigs while Diane Ladd,
as George’s wife Helen, seethes beneath her horrible granny helmet.

The Stars of Funny Girl and Pineapple Express,
Together at Last

Though Sue Mengers is the villain of the All Night Long debacle, she was reportedly one of the few people in Barbra’s life who could get away with calling the superstar out on her bullshit. And so, decades later, when the two women were again on speaking terms, it was Mengers who told Barbra to stop waffling and just accept the offer to star in THE GUILT TRIP, directed by Anne Fletcher.

“What do you mean you’re not holding?”

Seth Rogen is just as surprised as
you are that he is in a PG-13 movie.

The Guilt Trip was Barbra’s first starring role since 1996’s The Mirror Has Two Faces, which she also directed (can’t forget that detail!), and, to date, her last movie. Yet upon The Guilt Trip’s December 2012 release Barbra's return to the big screen was met only with mixed reviews and polite applause. That said, I’m stretching the premise by counting it as one of Barbra’s bombs. The Guilt Trip wasn’t a hit, but it did eventually make back its $40 million budget. It “underperformed” rather than flopped.

Barbra plays Joyce, a widowed mother who dotes on her adult son, Andy (Seth Rogen), a chemist and struggling entrepreneur. Though Andy finds Joyce’s attention stifling, he does worry about her being alone and invites her to join him on a cross-country drive from New Jersey to California, with him making stops at various retail chains along the way to pitch his environmentally friendly cleaning product, ScieoClean. Andy also has an ulterior motive: learning that Joyce's first love now lives in San Francisco, he plans a surprise reunion.

Andy begins to regret inviting his mother along for the ride.

The opening fifteen minutes of The Guilt Trip suggest it’s going to be little more than a 90-minute Jewish mother joke, but the movie has a bit more to it than that. Joyce is annoying but well meaning; Andy finds her overbearing and wishes she’d just shut the fuck up and give him some space—except when he needs her. Naturally, their relationship is tested, but by the time they reach the west coast their bond is stronger than ever. 

Joyce picks up a hitchhiker.

Barbra was perfectly cast as Joyce (she got a Worst Actress Razzie nomination for this movie, but like a lot of Razzie nominations, I suspect it was more than a little disingenuous, being more about taking Babs down a peg than it was about her actual performance). The wild card was Rogen, who in the early 2010s was known more for raucous/raunchy R-rated comedies like Knocked Up and Pineapple Express. Would people buy him in a role where he never once takes a bong hit or makes a crude sex joke? (This PG-13 movie’s one allotted f-bomb goes to Barbra.) Rogen’s persona at the time had me thinking that Bette Midler would be a more believable movie parent for him, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well he and Barbra play off each other. They’re actually believable as mother and son. If only they were funnier.

Andy and Joyce celebrate her competitive gluttony victory. On the far
right is Brett Cullum as Ben, a cowboy who is apparently into older
women who like to eat.

It's not that The Guilt Trip is devoid of laughs, it’s just that Dan Fogelman’s script is more sentimental than funny (the story is based on a real-life road trip he had taken with his mother). Most of the humor stems from Andy’s sarcastic asides to Joyce’s babbling. Where this trip veers off course is when Fogelman shoves in goofy contrivances, like when Joyce and Andy are stranded in the parking lot of a Tennessee titty bar and Joyce excitedly runs for the club’s front door because she misreads “topless” as “tapas.” Then there’s the scene in which Joyce participates in a Texas steakhouse’s eating challenge, which seems to be banking on audiences finding the sight of Barbra woofing down over three pounds of beef side-splitting. Hmmm, maybe it would’ve been better if Joyce lost a karaoke contest instead? There are also some lines that just haven’t aged well since the movie’s release, as when Joyce calls Andy her “little Donald Trump.” Oy!

All in all, The Guilt Trip is the kind of movie that would be described as cute. I remember thinking it was merely OK when I first saw it, ranking it as better than All Night Long but not as funny as For Pete’s Sake, or even Meet the Fockers. I had a higher opinion of the movie after a recent rewatch. The overall sweetness of the story resonated more the second time around, possibly because I’d lost my mother a few years ago and was more receptive to the sentimentality. I also laughed more than I remember doing on my first viewing. I still consider it one of Barbra’s lesser films, but it’s a little better than I initially gave it credit for.

Fashion forward: a track-suited Joyce adjusts Andy’s rumpled jacket.

Did it deserve to bomb underperform?: No, but it’s not surprising that it did. This thing was never going to make Marvel money (though, as I write this, Madame Web is making Guilt Trip money), however Paramount could’ve picked a better release date (Mother’s Day weekend, anyone?) The days when people flocked to see a Barbra Streisand movie had long since passed (even I, who saw All Night Long on its opening weekend, waited until The Guilt Trip was streaming), and younger audiences likely only knew Barbra as Roz Focker or a South Park punchline. Rogen’s fans at the time probably just wondered what the fuck he was doing in a PG-13 movie. But ultimately, the movie simply wasn’t funny enough to make people pay $8 U.S. to see it, especially in 2012’s economy.

Barbra has said she likely won’t make another movie, which isn’t surprising. She’s in her eighties, after all, though I wouldn't be surprised if she took one final, low effort/big payday film role before she dies (Book Club IV: The Wizening). So, for a career spanning more than six decades, the fact that she’s only had three box office misfires is a remarkable record. However, she’s also not been the most prolific actor, having made only 19 films, eight of those between 1981 and 2012. She hasn’t taken a lot of chances, either, sticking to musicals, comedies (romantic or otherwise) and romantic dramas. That may be great for a studio’s bottom line and Barbra's asking price, but I feel like she would have had a more interesting career if she had accepted some of the roles she turned down. In many cases, I’m glad she said no (King Kong, Poltergeist, The Exorcist 😮), but there are other film roles I wish she had taken. Would The Eyes of Laura Mars, Bagdad Cafe, or Misery (holy shit, really?) possibly have ended up on this list if she had accepted the offers to star in them? Highly likely, but, goddamn, how fun would those movies have been if they had been Barbra Streisand movies? No disrespect to Kathy Bates—she totally owned the part of Annie Wilkes and deserved her Oscar® for it—but I would very much want to see an alternate version of Misery with Barbra in that role. 

Like Frankenstein’s Monster, Only Fuckable

The folly of men playing God has been a favorite trope in sci-fi and horror films, as far back as James Whale’s 1931 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We probably have more to fear from God’s self-appointed enforcers (Google it; one link won’t do the subject justice), but our suspicions are more easily riled by those geeks in their labs, believing in evolution and telling us to wear masks, possibly because we all harbor memories of them ruining the grading curve in advanced biology back in high school. What other sinister things are the nerds up to, beside wrecking our GPAs and telling us to vaccinate our kids?

Hollywood knows: the scientists are building killer sex monsters!

Of course, that’s never the stated goal. In director Frank Nelson’s 1976 movie EMBRYO (a.k.a. Created to Kill), Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) is just trying to save babies. He gets to put his research to the test after he hits a pregnant Doberman pinscher while racing home one rainy night. The mother isn’t likely to survive, but Holliston thinks he can save her puppies, transferring them to his handy artificial womb and injecting them with “Placentolactogen,” the growth hormone he and his late wife were developing before she was killed in a car accident.

Fetal Puppy Syndrome

Only one of the pups survives, but it’s enough to convince the doctor he’s made a major breakthrough. What’s more, the puppy grows at an accelerated rate. In mere days, Holliston has a full-grown Doberman—named Number One—that can get its own food out of the refrigerator and put the bowl in the sink when he’s done. Number One can also let himself out of a parked car and kill a stuffed dog barking terrier, but the doctor, inside a hospital convincing a colleague to surrender any spare fetuses he might have lying around, isn’t around to witness his experiment’s sudden violent aggression.

Rock Hudson is astonished that his career has come to this.

Holliston’s pal at the hospital comes through, donating the fetus of a pregnant woman who committed suicide (hey, she’ll never miss it). The doctor quickly gets to work, pumping the baby so full of Placentolactogen that, in less than five weeks, he has a full-grown Barbara Carrera, who presents herself wearing nothing but her hair, Lady Godiva-style. The softcore Muzak on the soundtrack hammers home the message that she’s now down to fuck. The doctor names her Victoria, because her survival is a victory for both of them.

Like Number One, Victoria is a super-fast learner, going from basic math to reading the entire Bible (“An interesting story, but not very logical”). The doctor takes Victoria’s distinct Latin accent in stride. Were the movie to address this I’m sure it would explain away Victoria’s accent with a reference to her deceased mother being of Latin descent, as if accents are genetic. Instead, we’ll just assume that all humans injected with Placentolactogen sound like they come from Nicaragua.

The doctor, by the way, does not live alone. His sister-in-law Martha (Diane Ladd) stays with him as a housekeeper, and it’s implied she might aspire to take her late sister’s place as Holliston’s second wife. Yet the movie wants us to believe that not once during the weeks that Holliston was experimenting on a fetus, and then a human child, did Martha wonder what he was up to. Did Martha ever hear a baby cry or wonder about the dirty diapers in the laundry? Nope, not one fucking time. There’s one close call, when Martha enters the lab with the adult Victoria hiding behind the door, knife in hand, but otherwise, she is oblivious to her new housemate.

Martha finally meets Victoria weeks later at a party thrown by Holliston’s son Gordon and his pregnant wife Helen (John Elerick and Anne Schedeen, doing her best Brenda Vacarro impression), Holliston introducing her as his new live-in lab assistant. Martha is less than pleased, all but muttering “bitch” under her breath when Victoria walks away. Roddy McDowall, as a snooty chess player (“Chess is one of the last bastions of male chauvinism,” he huffs) whom Victoria almost bests in a game, isn’t a huge fan of Holliston’s “assistant” either. It’s to the movie’s detriment that there is no scene of Roddy and Martha huddling in the kitchen talking shit about Victoria. Everyone else—including Dr. Joyce Brothers in a WTF? cameo—finds Holliston’s hot new assistant absolutely charming.

A party in serious need of cocaine.

Barbara Carrera is ready to learn.

After the party, Victoria surprises Holliston in his bedroom, letting him know she wants her experiences with intercourse to extend beyond the social kind. “I want to learn,” she says breathily, her nipples showing plainly through a sheer gown (Embryo may be rated PG, but it’s a ’70s PG). The popping of Victoria’s cherry is the beginning of the end, however, as one orgasm is all it takes for her to start experiencing some painful side effects. Now she’ll stop at nothing to get the 70ml of “pituitary gland extract” from an unborn fetus she needs to stay young and hot, even if it means endangering the lives of a pregnant hooker and Helen. Basically, she turns into [insert name of celebrity addicted to plastic surgery here] on the eve of his/her 40th birthday.

Embryo is basically a 1970s take on a 1950s mad scientist movie. (MoriaReviews.com sources an even earlier—and uncredited—inspiration, the 1928 German film Alraune.) Though he’s phoning it in, Hudson makes the movie watchable, but even his star power can’t keep Embryo from looking like a made-for-TV movie (only Carrerra’s bare breasts assure us it isn’t). Ladd has been in worse movies, but she’s wasted here, asked to do little more than look annoyed and serve coffee. Carrera does OK despite being is miscast, though her nude scenes will make more of an impression than her performance.

Penis Slugs and an Exciting Fetish

Nearly 33 years later Embryo’s plot was revived in 2009’s SPLICE. (Or, 81 years later Alraune’s basic plot was again recycled, but I’m henceforth sticking to my Embryo/Splice comparison. Let’s just accept there’s nothing new under the sun.) Though it is a rehash of an old story, director Vincenzo Natali was allowed to do what so many studios are now afraid to do: avail himself of an R-rating, making a movie reminiscent of the earlier work of fellow Canadian David Cronenberg. Guess it helps to have Guillermo del Toro as an executive producer.

Our protagonists are Clive and Elsa (Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley, respectively), genetic engineers at Nucleic Exchange Research & Development, or NERD (groan-inducing wordplay like that just re-enforces the Cronenberg comparisons). In the opening scene we see the couple, who are also romantic partners, birth something that looks like a cross between a slug and a malformed penis. It’s introduced to a previously birthed, much smaller-but-who’s-judging penis slug, the female. The two penis slugs—named Fred and Ginger—immediately extend long, petal-tipped tongues from their urethra-like mouths, swirling them around each other in such a way that they form a pink flower between them. It’s almost pretty. “They’re imprinting,” says an awestruck Elsa.

When penis slugs meet.

Fred and Ginger are the result of splicing DNA from multiple species, and they can be used to produce medicinal proteins. Clive and Elsa are eager to move on to the next phase of their research, incorporating human DNA, but the corporation funding their work—represented by a somewhat sinister Simona Maicanescu—wants to get Fred and Ginger on the market as soon as possible. The lab’s ass-kissing boss, William Barlow (David Hewlett of Stargate: Atlantis, as well as Natali’s earlier film, Cube), readily concurs.

Clive and Elsa aren’t so accepting of the decision and immediately head to the lab for an experimentation montage. The end result is something that resembles a sentient testicle, but that’s only the placenta. What bursts out kind of resembles a shaved, earless cat with two digitigrade legs. It’s kind of cute, actually. Like Holliston’s experiment in Embryo, Clive and Elsa’s “baby” develops rapidly, taking on more humanoid characteristics but still distinctly alien. She looks nothing like Barbara Carrera. They name her Dren, nerd spelled backwards (Natali and his co-screenwriters Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor might have reconsidered that name had they watched Farscape).

Sarah Polley lures her creation with her tasty, tasty fingers.

Dren’s existence begins to put a strain on the scientists’ relationship. Earlier they discuss having a baby. Clive wants to start a family; Elsa, who had a miserable childhood, does not. Yet it’s Elsa who is eager to bond with Dren, though she seems to treat her more like a pet than a child (some of her teaching techniques are reminiscent of Dr. Joan Crawford’s in Trog). Clive, feeling the strain of having to keep Dren secret, wants her out of their lives. He discovers Dren has amphibious lungs when he holds her head under water. “How did you know?” Elsa asks. “You did know, right?” Clive says yes, but his eyes say something else.

Separated at birth: Delphine Chanéac as Dren; Björk in the video for “Hunter.”

Because their co-workers at NERD are more curious than Diane Ladd, and because they can’t exactly stick a wig on Dren and introduce her as a new lab assistant (she does sort of look like Björk; Icelanders have tails, right?), the renegade scientists need to get Dren away from the lab. Fortunately, Elsa just happens to own a plot convenience: a farm that she inherited from her mother. It’s at this farm that we begin to see Elsa exhibit behavior that invites more Joan Crawford comparisons. Elsa is a perfectly loving parent when Dren is docile and compliant, but she loses her shit when Dren acts out. Then again, what are we to expect when it’s revealed Elsa’s childhood bedroom was more like a cell in a Turkish prison. Elsa’s was not a happy childhood, and yet she held on to this farm, a place that was a living hell for her, paying the taxes and utility bills instead of putting it up for sale before her mother’s body was cold? This strains credulity more than the creation of Dren...

...or the idea that anyone would choose to drive a Gremlin in the 2000s.

Clive isn’t exactly Father of the Year. Like Holliston, he crosses some boundaries, but Clive also brings an exciting fetish into the mainstream [link very NSFW]. There’s also a key tonal difference in how the two movies handle the sex between scientist and, um, subject that makes Splice a bit more disturbing. Because Embryo treats the adult Victoria as a sex object from the get-go, the movie and the audience can bypass any pesky questions about the morality of this relationship (not that anyone watching Embryo is going to think about it that hard). In Splice, however, Dren, besides being a unique species, is presented as being like Clive and Elsa’s daughter, adding an extra layer of “eww!” (or “ahh!,” if that’s your fantasy). Regardless of whether or not you think Clive has committed incest, he’s definitely cheated on Elsa. 

Adrian Brody’s O (I-fucked-up) face.

Things soon take a more tragic—and rapey—turn in the final act, as the movie abandons psychological nuance in favor of straight-up horror, winding down to a sequel-bait ending—or so it would seem. According to Natali, he just liked the idea of leaving things open-ended; he never intended for there to be a sequel. (That Splice under-performed at the box office probably ensured the studio didn’t try to persuade him to change his plans.) With Hollywood being more interested in creating franchises than telling stories, even way back in 2009, I simply forgot that ending movies on a question mark was still a thing.

I had wanted to see Splice when it first came out, but the film was released in the U.S. in June 2010, when I, along with much of the rest of the world, was struggling to stay afloat during a global recession. Dropping $10 on a matinee ticket just seemed irresponsible. Thankfully Splice is currently on Netflix in the U.S.*, during another economic downturn, no less (this movie just might be cursed). Despite its link to financial catastrofucks, Splice is still worth checking out, especially if you like your sci-fi horror to  have a few extra I.Q. points, are nostalgic for Cronenberg’s 1980s horror movies, or just enjoy watching sex scenes featuring human/animal hybrids. Those who enjoy ’70s schlock can find Embryo streaming on various sites, with the version on Tubi being the least shitty looking of the bunch.

*This is a prime sponsorship opportunity, NordVPN. Just sayin’.