I haven’t gotten out to any of the “big” films yet this summer, and aside from reliable ol’ Pixar every option sounds like a gamble. I did take a contractually-obligated trip to the new Karate Kid, which I ended up liking quite fine–almost as much as the two boys who I took–and mainly because Jackie Chan is such an affecting, engaging Miyagi replacement. But, while a reboot, it ain’t horror.
Vincenzo Natali’s Splice,however,is horrific, in (alas) too many ways. I’d call it a reboot because its originality lies in its reconception and occasionally-inspired reframing of some very familiar horror tropes; you could as easily steal the film’s own symbolics of gene-splicing. Frankenstein, the Fly, Freud. . . but the film’s deepest genetic debt is to David Cronenberg, and not just for the scientists’ misbegotten creature creation — the vague sinister corporations and the game gory delight in sexual perversities come straight out of his late ’70s and early ’80s low-budget output, as well. Unfortunately, like a lot of genmod work, this film kind of shuffles about, its musculature weirdly misshapen and ineffectual. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, as absurdly hip nerds, give each new nasty wrinkle their all, but the film is never straight enough to be truly scary and never outre enough to exploit its uncanny potential. The scientists make a creepy creature, who grows up and, as it gets more like “us,” gets increasingly more alien and more aggressively self-interested. Don’t they all? The echoes of child-rearing are all intentional, and yet … meh. As the film took increasingly risky steps away from the typical creature-feature toward more archetypal horrors, it just got silly. And never silly enough. Ambitious, but confoundingly dull. (As the creature spells out at one point, T-E-D-I-O-U-S.)
Jaume Baluguero and Paco Plaza’s sequel, Rec 2, on the other hand literally starts where the first one ended. (Their first got remade adequately in the States as Quarantine, a very faithful translation–which wasn’t quite as scary, but followed the original so intently it felt more like a conjoined twin than a remake.) The set-up: a viral epidemic in an apartment house ends up in zombie-ish horrors. The first was shot first-person-camera style, with the conceit that a reality television crew was following an EMT team. It ended badly for everyone. The second opens with a SWAT team going in, each with helmet-cams; later there’s another group of people with a camera, too. The film explicitly returns to the very same well, but so what? Balaguero and Plaza have a swaggering confidence in their ability to shape scares and story; the multiple cameras sets up a fracturing of the timeline and some intriguing repetitions, there is a goony enhanced revision of the provenance of the disease (which brings in some other horror archetypes), and the smile on the filmmakers’ faces is almost visible as they run us through the paces — the film has an almost joyous glee in its work that Splice lacked entirely. (Its tone reminded me of Sam Raimi. Plaza’s done this before–I’ve raved about his A Xmas Tale in one of my annual Halloween megaposts on genre pleasures.) THIS is how you splice and suture new tricks from old gene(r/t)ic stock.