‘Splice’: Horror gives way to silliness

As Dr. Frankenstein and countless others have learned, man should not mess with certain experiments while in a laboratory. And yet the characters in “Splice” go blithely ahead, driven by curiosity or misplaced parental yearning.

Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) have made progress in developing strange little mutant creatures whose genetic gunk can be harvested to cure who-knows-what. (Their unit has the acronym NERD, which seems like poor foresight.)

But when their funding is pulled, the scientists go rogue, pursuing secret experiments with a distinctly humanoid emphasis.

There are some nicely horror-ific scenes with a new secret monster baby that grows up quickly, a cute little semi-human gal with an unfortunately lethal stinger in her tail.

Director Vincenzo Natali, who once made an enjoyably offbeat puzzler called “Cube,” takes time to let his dire creature grow to premature adulthood (played, somewhere beneath the makeup, by Delphine Chaneac). A couple of mildly kicky twists keep the plot moving.

But even though Natali tries to defuse the silly factor with some decent one-liners, and even though Brody and Polley are frankly overqualified for the material, at some point “Splice” becomes more incredible than its premise can reasonably support.

Or noncredible, maybe, in terms of what the characters decide to do and how they do it. Brody and Polley (she was in David Cronenberg’s “eXistenZ,” which is a distant cousin to this movie) try to make their characters’ behavior believable, but it’s a tough slog after a certain point.

“Splice” has some of the cold, cerebral feel of Canadian horror, especially as practiced by Cronenberg at his best. This works in favor of the film, because there are certain hot-blooded desires at loose in the story that will eventually come out (and make the experiment go even more disastrously than it already was going).

Despite my reservations about it, horror aficionados should definitely give “Splice” a look, as a distinctly 21st-century variation on an old story. It’s got a reliable lesson embedded in its cautionary tale: When it comes to collapse of dangerous experiments, the problems turn out to be human error.