Adrien Brody, Mad Scientist

"The wreckage of the jazz age was a forbidding new landscape. Millions waited for a scapegoat or a deliverer. A new and controversial kind of entertainment - the gangster picture - served as a lightning rod for public anger and cynicism; audiences vicariously took part in adventures outside the law and standards of fair play that now seemed utterly irrelevant. The popular interest in gangsters wasn't an entirely vicarious identification: Prohibition, after all, had literally turned millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals. But the most lasting and influential invention of 1931 would be the modern horror film. Monster movies opened up the possibility of psychic lawlessness; a monster, for Hollywood, was a gangster of the id and unconscious. Cataclysmic junctures in history usually stir up strong imagery in the collective mind, and the years following the 1929 economic crash were no exception." (David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, p. 114)

Pick a topic, any hot topic, and chances are good you'll find it in Splice (two stars total; released on DVD last week). From the title alone, you know it includes animal experimention and and human cloning, but it also tells the story of a couple making major life transitions involving abortion rights, gender roles, overprotective parents, rural relocation and sex education. I haven't even mentioned corporate restructuring and the pharmaceutical industry, which are the most important issues to the plot. All this comes during our nation's current financial crisis and uncertainty over health care reform. If that seems contrived, cutting edge or just plain relevant, refer back to the quote above, about horror movies during the Great Depression. They say there's nothing new under the sun, but I guess there's nothing new under microscopes either. I never saw Species (1995), but I get the impression it shares a lot in common with Splice (2009). Maybe this is just me, but does anyone else have a problem with only being able to see certain actors in the role that you first saw them? For me, Adrien Brody will always be the jealous, mentally-challenged, murderous psychopath that he played on The Village (2004), which was the first movie I saw him in. That's what made it so hard for me to see him as a romantic lead in King Kong (2005) or as a tough guy on Predators (2010). But I can totally buy him as an adulterous, mad scientist that listens to "über" music.