The childless Elsa is so captivated by Dren’s capacity for learning that she’s willing to overlook her offspring’s increasingly homicidal tendencies - another mistake when your “daughter” has a lethal stinger in her tail.Įlsa’s boyfriend, meanwhile, tries to drown Dren after some particularly nasty misbehavior - but, wouldn’t you know it, she’s sprouted a set of gills. The couple is so preoccupied with their latest hybrid - which they hide from their colleagues - that Fred and Ginger end up giving investors a demonstration that’s unforgettable in ways that are entirely unforeseen, and quite hilarious.Ĭlive and Elsa are busy in the basement raising the rapidly growing, feral creature (Abigail Chu, with lots of help from computer-generated images) that Elsa names Dren (spell it backward). Needless to say, keeping this particular baby turns out to be a huge mistake.Ĭlive and Elsa (amusingly named for the stars of “Bride of Frankenstein”) work for a bio-med company that’s pressing them to monetize their earlier gene-splicing experiment - a pair of tongue-like creatures they’ve dubbed Fred and Ginger - before it goes belly up. Brody’s Clive, whose ethical concerns have been pushed away by his girlfriend, wants to destroy the hybrid embryo before it comes to term, as they previously agreed.īut her burgeoning maternal instincts prevail.
The fetus in question has been engineered from the genes of various animals - as well as Polley’s character, Elsa. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play a superstar geneticist couple who at one point debate abortion in Vincenzo Natali’s smart, scary - and at times very funny - horror movie “Splice.”