Forgotten Frights II: Aliens

Forgotten Frights is back! To celebrate the second anniversary of our annual horror movie roundup, every weekday for the next month we're going to sound off on a scary good sequel (or, if we want some cheese with our corn syrup, a schlocky second), ruminating on the returns of our favourite monsters, murderers, heroes (or heroines), creepies, crawlies, chills and thrills.

What came before: Ellen Ripley, crew member aboard an intergalactic but very vague mission on behalf of a space exploration and development company, was the sole survivor after the crew became infected by a face-sucking alien species that impregnated them with a parasite that burst through their chests and killed them (obviously). At the end of Alien, Ripley put herself and her cat into stasis while her space pod floated away, with the hopes of being rescued by a passing ship.

What remains: Ripley is the only character left (and the cat). She finds out that she’s been floating in space for 57 years, and everyone she knew and loved is now dead, including her daughter. Ripley is discredited by her employer, but when the company loses contact with the colony that has been living on the planet where the alien comes from, Ripley agrees to go investigate. The rest of the rescue crew finds out she’s not crazy soon enough, as face-suckers show up very quickly. Added bonus: the company wants to bring home specimens of the face-suckers with the hope of developing them into biological weapons.

Why it deserves a second (or third, or fourth) chance:

• Paul Reiser as the evil company guy who wants to bring home specimens of the aliens for biological weapon development. Nice to see him in a non-Mad About You way.
• Classic scene where the alien rips through Ripley’s stomach. Every pregnant woman’s worst nightmare. (Ripley’s, too.)
• We learn more about the alien, even if it is through the heavy-handed lens of maternal protection/biological determinism. We learn there’s a female, and she’s the Queen, and she’s smart, and she’s definitely the scariest of them all.
• James Cameron wrote and directed. That guy knows how to make a blockbuster.
• 7 Oscar nominations, including Sigourney Weaver for Best Actress.
• Hey, remember when the third Matrix came out like 6 months after the second Matrix? And how awful it was? Well, Aliens came a good 7 years after the original. They took their time to get it right, I say.
• Bill Paxton, being kind of shrill.
• This movie was definitely bigger and badder than the first, by far. Alien had a more horror-movie sensibility to it; it was quieter, creepier. Aliens was an action movie, pure and simple. But it was a smart action movie.
• Personally, I think this may be the best of the franchise. It’s relentless, high-adrenaline, and your nerves are frayed by the end. It’s more terror than horror. I really, really love Alien as well, but the franchise clearly heads into a tailspin after this film.
• Ripley is a feminist film-lover’s dream.

By: Jennifer Simpson
Favourite (non-existent) section of the video store:

Women Talking to Other Women About Things Other Than Men

DVD: The Divide

I'm a bit of a germaphobe (or so I'm told; I think my constant hand-washing and sanitization are more than justifiable). Old places, basements and unfinished room also sometimes gross me out because they've collected years of dust and germs (you can laugh, but I'm sure some of you completely understand). I hadn't really realized that The Divide took place in an old, unfinished, apartment basement when I saw the trailer. Even still, I could get over that, but over two hours, this movie just grew to become more and more disgusting, beyond poor hygiene into physical human cruelty, emotional torment and ultimately societal corruption and despair. This movie left me with such a feeling of disgust that no amount of soap could wash away.

The Divide follows a group of survivors camping out in their apartment basement after New York is ravaged by nuclear blasts. They've sealed themselves in, in fear of the slightest leak and contamination. Trapped together, we watch as humanity crumbles and self-destructs.

It's like a much less intelligible, perversion of a The Lord of the Flies-type story that fails to examine the fundamentals of society and relationships, but rather just tears it apart for fun, or lack thereof. It's an ultimate gross-out of a movie that crawls under your skin and churns your stomach, so much that you're distracted from its strong performances, great use of a tiny set and potentially good writing. In fact, these things don't matter. It seems the sole purpose of this movie is to do exactly that, make you feel sick and dirty.

I wanted to like this movie. I love sci-fi and can appreciate low-budget creativity (actually, more so than big-budget). I was also open to a post-apocalyptic survival story, as much as we're currently saturated with the like. The Divide could have been so much more. It could have been clever and artistic and challenging. Instead, it was just challenging to watch. D+

Starring Milo Ventimiglia and Lauren German. Directed by Xavier Gens. 121 minutes. Unrated

Forgotten Frights, Oct. 20: Cube

CUBE (1997)

Section of the cinematic cemetery: Sci-fi psycho-drama, Saw-style, but pre-Saw

Cause of (premature) death: It’s a low-budget Canadian sci-fi film. How low budget? $365,000. And it grossed only a fraction of that opening weekend in the States.

What its tombstone would read: Seven strangers awoke to find themselves in a larger-than-life-size fatally booby-trapped Rubik’s Cube of sort.

Why it should be revived: Like I said, it’s Saw, pre-Saw. But what really makes this film so great aren’t just the deadly traps of acid-sprays and falling graters, but also the intellectualness of it all. The strangers wake up in a small square room. Each wall of the room has a door that leads to another square room, each marked by a several-digit number. What that number tells them is whether that room is safe or rigged with a trap. The rooms are also shifting every few seconds. And the number reveals that too. It’s all about decoding the number and figuring out which cube will lead them out, all in the midst of outbursts of human drama, paranoia and mass confusion. It’s a tense, clever, gross-out film that accumulates in the greatest upheaval of all.

Fille Trip: The Thing

Get to know the girls behind the blog as they team up to liveblog about their trip to the cinema together.

Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Eric Christian Olsen. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. 103 minutes. 14A

Join us on October 17 at 7 p.m. as we chat about The Thing. Feel free to chime in in the comments!

Never Seen It! Sunday: The Thing

You know when you're talking to someone you think is like totally happening in a far out way and they ask if you've seen their favourite movie and you lie and say you seen "parts of it" because you don't want to seem like a total pop culture pariah? Yeah, we do too - and we hate ourselves for it! That's why we're vowing to watch at least one movie we've put off, ignored, rejected or just plain-out forgot about every week from now on. Join us as recount the popping of our cinematic cherries, complete with awkward, over-analytical details!

Photo: impaawards.com

THE THING

DATE RELEASED: June 25, 1982

DATE ACTUALLY WATCHED: October 8, 2011

WHY NOW? The scene-for-scene remake—er, prequel?—of this cult classic (which follows a research team in Antarctica who have to turn against one another when an alien starts inhabiting their bodies) comes out next Friday and I want to be able to critique it with the best of the sci-fi horror nerds and John Carpenter connoisseurs. 

WHY NOT THEN? It came out seven years before I was born.

EXPECTATIONS:

• Kurt Russell, being extraterrestrially badass.
• Lots of gnarly, pre-CGI make-up that puts modern stuff to shame.
• Gorgeous snow-bank cinematography.
• An overwhelming, heart-freezing ending.
• Basically 30 Days of Night, minus the vamps, plus a body-snatching alien.
  

WHAT I ACTUALLY GOT...

Super 8

 

 Photo: Paramount Pictures
 (8 is more than enough.)

Starring Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning and Kyle Chandler. Directed by J.J. Abrams. 112 minutes. PG

Super 8 may kick off with a train wreck of epic (and possibly extraterrestrial) proportions, but J.J. Abrams’ sci-fi adventure film is anything but that. It blazes pre-established trails smoothly and near-effortlessly and moves at a pleasant pace. It’s fast enough to make it worth your while, but slow enough to give you a chance to take in the oft-missed scenery – which in this nostalgia-heavy case, is made up of the love lives, pet projects and various monstrosities (!) facing a group of tween cinephiles in 1970s Ohio.

Abrams pulled off an unimaginable feat while advertising Super 8, keeping the previews completely spoiler-free. In various interviews, the Lost creator, Star Trek director and Cloverfield producer has said that it was an attempt to recapture the magic of movies from his youth: the element of shared, in-theatre surprise. While he most definitely achieves that, he provides professional popcorn munchers with an even more pleasant punch line. He presents a film that completely ignores the last twenty or so years of high-budget, low-plot summer blockbusters, and picks up where Jaws, Back to the Future and Jurassic Park left off, using an out-of-this-world occurrence (and the spectacular special effects that come along with it) as the back-drop for down-to-earth dilemmas -- instead of the other way around. 

 

While the setting, soundtrack (Best “My Sharona” sing-a-long since Reality Bites!) and oddly in-style costumes (High-waisted flares and pastels!) harken back to many a terrific late 1970s, early 1980s drive-in flick (i.e. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Goonies), Super 8 would be best subtitled as E.T. meets Freaks and Geeks. That is, if the geeks bowed down to George A. Romero as opposed to Steve Martin. And the freaks were played by AJ Michalka (yes, the half of Aly and AJ) and David Gallagher (yes, the blonde boy from 7^th Heaven). 

The movie’s title refers to the type of film a group of young horror/fantasy movie nerds and budding filmmakers (Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills, Gabriel Basso) are using to record scenes for their short zombie movie. Since they are trying to get the freaky little flick into a festival, they have decided to spend their summer shooting, scripting, scouting locations and talking about it obsessively. Although not technically the leader at the film’s outset, the group’s Sam Weir is Joe Lamb (brand newcomer Courtney, who is Emile Hirsch’s doppelgänger in looks and Henry Thomas' in acting), a talented little monster make-up artist and model builder with who just lost his mom (in an unexplained accident) and as a result, is slowly losing his deputy dad (Kyle Chandler, TV’s Friday Night Lights). 

Things are going well for Joe and co. until the film’s director, Charles (Griffiths, a camera-wielding Chunk) realizes they’re missing something major: character development. It’s why people “care about what happens,” he says. So they enlist an older girl, Alice (Elle Fanning, who is giving her sister a run for her hard-earned money in the sincerity department), to play their leading man’s wife and a possible victim. But their plan gets slightly derailed when, well, that train I mentioned earlier crash lands all over their set, and sends strangely small white boxes and their creepy AP science teacher flying. 

At this point Abrams could have gone all-out B-movie, focusing directly on the Monster Squad-style pursuit of what will become a car engine-stealing, dog-thwarting force. But he takes a note from Charles – and his co-producer, Steven Spielberg, who injected feeling into mainstream sci-fi and fantasy films many times over throughout his impressive career. Sure, there are some crafty creature creep-outs (one scene literally seemed like a tribute to the bus attack in Jeepers Creepers 2), but Super 8 really soars when it zooms in on the human relationships which come out of them.  One of the best scenes is when the kids are all sitting at a diner, stealing each other’s fries and shooting the middle school shit. And don't get me started on the moment when Alice and Joe finally get some zombie face-time.

The emotion-heavy script is a bold choice on Abrams' part, leaving some questions unanswered and leads undeveloped as far as the big mystery goes, but it makes for a much more moving movie-going experience. You could argue that the film relies too heavily on this retro formula and tired kiddie adventure tropes, and doesn’t break any new ground as a result. However, in this day and age, it's quite the opposite. This generation needs to see that while decepticons and 3D dragons may look cool, without a great story and character to back them up, there's little to actually care about. Super 8 shows us that alien activity, in terms of blockbuster film content and tone, is not something to be afraid of, but fearlessly explored.  A-

Freaky Fortnight!: Donnie Darko

Photo: movieposter.com

DONNIE DARKO (2001)

THE GIST: On the night of October 2, 1988, a 6-foot bunny named Frank lures a teenager named, you guessed it, Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal at his geeky best) from his bedroom to tell him the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. The next morning, a rogue jet engine falls on his bedroom. Donnie survives, having sleepwalked to a nearby golf course, but for the next 28 days, he continues to be visited by Frank, who inspires him to perform various destructive deeds - and explore the worm holes that begin appearing around him.

TRICK OR TREAT: Tricky treat. This is definitely not one for the kids. Not only is it fairly adult (think, indepth convos about Smurf genitalia), it can also just be flat-out confusing, especially in the later sections. Even after seeing it an obscene amount of times (it's one of both our all-time favourites), we're still trying to figure it all out.

WHY IT GETS US IN THE SPIRIT: Although it's technically only Halloween for the last few (albeit, also the most important) scenes, this movie will definitely make you wish it was October 31st. With it's dark humour, hushed lighting and warped plot, the movie manages to capture that morosely macabre feeling you only get on All Hallow's Eve - and secretly wish for every other day of the year.

SCENE TO DIE FOR: There is so much awesomeness embedded in this trippy time-travel tale, but one of my favourite non-spoilery moments has to be when we first visit Donnie's private school. As Donnie slowly walks out of the back of the school bus, the dialogue cuts out and Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels" begins to blare. We follow Donnie for about 30 seconds and then we rush past all of the people who will help and hinder him on his metaphysical quest, including the most badass fictional dance troupe of all-time: Sparkle Motion. It's so simple, but so perfect.

BEST COSTUME: It's a tie - between Frank's stupid bunny suit and Donnie's stupid man suit.

SUGGESTED SWEET: Razzles. Not only are they both guaranteed to time warp you back to the 80s, you can never really stop chewing on either one. Also awesome: all those pesky, pre-packaged gummy rabbits leftover from Easter.

DVD: Splice

Photo: amazon.com

Starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley. Directed by Vincenzo Natali. 104 minutes. 18A

Hmm. Odd. Interesting. Very interesting. Splice is a strange film. Its very hypothetical, as all sci-fi films are, but also very relevant and chilling in its possibilities.

Splice tells the story of two biochemists who are also a couple. Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) are experimenting with the DNA of various animals in attempt to develop cures for diseases, including cancer. Along the way, they create two slug-like new lifeforms by mixing animal DNA. They name them Fred and Ginger. While they continue to study their mushy friends, they begin working on a side project, a side project that their company has forbidden them to work on and for obvious reasons. The couple combine the hybrid-animal DNA with human DNA to create yet another new creature. That's when the lines between ethics, legalities and relationships become blurred and the mess begins to snowball.

Should this creature exist? Is this an experiment? Or has this become a relationship? Is this a being that needs to be loved? Or should this creature be killed? And where exactly did they cross the point of no return? These are all questions Splice asks and dances around but is never really meant to answer. It's rather to get the audience thinking these things as Elsa and Clive come to terms with them.

The subject isn't the only quirky part of this film, so are both the lead characters and their relationship. They're obsessive, workaholic scientists with an undying love for each other. They like to eat candy and listen to heavy rock while they work, occasionally sprinkled with some lip action. In their own odd way, they seem like a modern fairytalesque couple.

By far the strangest parts in this film are the sex scenes. Without giving too much away, they are all very awkward and somehow wrong yet hard to turn away from. You want them to happen as much as you don't want them to happen.

This film was also tagged as a horror but it's not exactly. It does have many horror elements but only a very short portion of the film could actually be considered "horror." Instead, the most horrifying thing about the film is the thought that scientists somewhere are creating new organisms. Sometimes they just die but other times they're killed, loved, nurtured, cloned, bred... who really knows. It's strange to think about that world you will probably never have access to.

That's what makes this film so intriguing. It pulls you into a hypothetical world of genetic science and lets you explore, knowing that for now, you don't have to venture into the real horrors of the biochemical world yourself. But it reminds you that they exist and may one day escape. A-

DVD EXTRAS: Featurette with Vincenzo Natali

The Last Airbender

Photo: allmoviephoto.com

(Not much to see here.)

Starring Noah Ringer, Dev Patel and Nicola Peltz. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. 103 minutes. PG

You're probably wondering what the hell an airbender is. But don't watch the film to find out; it'll leave you wondering a whole lot more, namely, what the point of it all is.

In The Last Airbender, races are categorized by elements: Air, Water, Earth and Fire. The film begins with brother and sister Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) and Katara (Nicola Peltz), members of the Southern Water Tribe, trekking through an icy passage. Katara is a waterbender, meaning she can manipulate water for use as a weapon. She's practicing her "bending" when she melts a patch of ice, revealing a massive marble-like iceberg. She smashes it, it melts and inside is Aang and his six-legged flying bison.

Aang is the last airbender, but since there are no more existing airbenders, he must be the reincarnation of the Avatar, able to bend all elements. There's also Zuko (Dev Patel), a Fire Nation prince banished by his father and ordered to capture the Avatar. His father, Fire Lord Ozai (Cliff Curtis) is also out to catch the Avatar so that he does not have to redeem his son. Nothing really makes much sense or seems to have a point before the halfway mark.

Patel aside, most of the acting seems out of a low-budget, local television show, adults and children alike. Of course, it is a kids film so they probably didn't pay any attention to it but if you aren't nine years old, it's unbearable at times. On the other hand, Patel plays the role of evil well. Maybe a bit too much in scenes of anger, but his anguish seems genuine. You almost want cold-hearted papa Ozai to ask for forgiveness and hug his poor, abandoned son.

The only other captivating part of this film would have to be the visuals. A glossy, floating orb of water, spilling in small lashes as Katara bends it through the air seems all too real. And creatures like Aang's bison are interesting enough to steal the entire scene. Then again, there's not much to steal from.

If feels as if there's much more the story that we aren't being told, yet at the same time, we are being told so much. Although nothing seems to fit together. It bogs the entire film down. You're too busy trying to piece together the back story that the hollow plot floats on by. D

Don't You Forget About: Signs

Sure, it's fun to catch the latest flick at the multiplex, or grab the newest release at a video store, but sometimes you just gotta say, "Out with the new, and in with the unknown." There are plenty of older flicks out there that are worth a rental, but never registered on your radar. In Don't You Forget About, we remember the long-gone gems, so you don't have to.

 

Photo: movieposter.com

Aliens exist. I don't care what anyone else tells me. This cannot be the only planet in the universe where circumstances are so coincidentally perfect that lifeforms exist. And there's also more than good chance that we aren't the most advanced lifeforms either. 

Yes, I believe that there are aliens out there who can demolish humanity. What evidence do I have? Well, I only seemed like a loony until this April when the king of physics himself, Stephen Hawking, said it's only logical that aliens exist. And that if they came to Earth, they might very well want to destroy us. (They might also not want to destroy us, but that's not very scary.) Yeah, I still sound like a loony. But for those of us who fear the existence of those unknown beings, a well-done alien film is one of the most truly frightening things. Hey, at least we aren't afraid of ghosts or zombies or even chainsaw-wielding Leatherfaces, because these things just aren't real now, are they? I can hear your silent mockery...

Signs is one of the few alien films that does it right. Aliens are chilling, mysterious beings that we know very little about, not bug-eyed, slimy, short, bulb-headed, green things. Films can't tell us what aliens are because we don't know, so by hiding his aliens in shadows, silhouettes and off-screen, M. Night Shyamalan lets aliens be whatever we secretly imagine they are. Even in scenes where we catch of glimpse of the stalkish, gangly ETs, we know that there's much more to them than what we see.

Set in the farmland of little Bucks County, Signs centres on father Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), his children Bo (an unbelievably-cute five-year-old Abigail Breslin) and Morgan (Rory Culkin), and his brother Merrill (pre-rap Joaquin Phoenix), who moved in with the family when Graham's wife died in a freak accident on the roadside. While Graham copes with the loss of his wife, holding the family together and leaving the clergy, aliens begin to subtly (then not-so-subtly) invade Earth and drop signs along the way.

Aside from the potentially real, poisonous gas-seeping aliens out to harvest humans, it's also a story about faith. While Graham has backed down as Reverend, half the town still calls him Father, meanwhile, he begins to question God. Along with dealing with death and parenting, it adds another layer to the story, making characters a bit more real, and in turn, making the possibility of alien invasion more real too (for those who need convincing).

What also makes the aliens more real is Morgan's book. When the family visits the city one day, Morgan buys a book about extraterrestrials. Juxtaposing absurd theories and hypotheses about space life with what actually happens in the film makes alien-doubters seem, well, wrong. It's not about what the bogus books say, it's about what's real.

But what's most rattling about this film are the things we don't see. It's the glimpse of an odd, twiggy leg in the cornfield, the bristling of the leaves, the off-screen rustling on the roof, and most of all, the trashing and pounding behind a closed door. Sure, the quick, distant slither across the screen or the reflection in the television set is enough to make you jump but it's what you never have access too that allows your mind to delve into the most chilling possibilities.

What also creeps through your veins is the idea that crop circles snowball into the end of the world. The family follows the news through an old, staticky television and an old, dusty radio, because old things are creepy. Sound crackles, signal cuts out. As if odd coincidences weren't enough to give you goosebumps, it's jolting when you find out that it's happening to the rest of the world, and getting bigger, as aliens crash birthday parties and intercept the airways. It makes you wonder about the coincidences in your own life. You know, the signs.

While it's clear that Shyamalan's art is haunting sci-fi, the cinematography in this film is also gorgeous. Of course, cornfields, farms and old, rickety houses make beautiful photo settings, Shyamalan's brilliance is in his framing. In one scene, Graham sits on the stairs and through the railing posts, we see Merrill, Bo and Morgan on the couch in the living room with foil paper hats on their heads keeping aliens from reading their minds, as they have a conversation. It's only one of the amazing scenes Shyamalan paints.

Entranced by picturesque scenes, shivering in fear of aliens, Signs is more than a fitting film for the suspicious, and even better for the ET believers, because we all want a film that confirms our greatest fears.

Terribly Awesome!: The Faculty

Just another Manic Monday? Wish it was Sunday? Nothing beats a case of the Mondays like a camp-out. And we ain't talkin' s'mores, sing-a-longs and psycho killers. We're talking about getting in touch with your guilty pleasure zone. That's right, every Monday we'll be bringing you the best of the worst. It's gonna be awesome - and terrible! - all at the same time.

Photo: Movieposter.com

Although I consider myself to be a Cinefille, I have to admit there is one genre that I can hardly bear to browse when I hit the videostore/local megaplex: sci-fi. With the exception of my first favourite movie, E.T., the space cowboys awesomeness of Firefly/Serenity and of course, the Alien series, I find it really hard to take any movie that goes where no non-NASA earth resident has gone before seriously. Especially when said movie takes place in said space. But things get a bit more complicated when sci-fi flicks co-mingle with the one genre I live, breath and spend every single Christmas gift-card on: terrible late 90s teen dramedies.

No movie has made my sci-fi-terrified mind more confused than the epicness that is The Faculty. At most schools, the only thing terrifying the non-staff members is the tedious number of extra-curriculars they need to get into their choice college. But at Herrington High, things are getting downright extra-terrestorial. More specifically, body-stealing creepy crawlies are taking over the principals, teachers and various other staff members and make a group of totally unrelated students want to make like The Breakfast Club. Wait, it gets worse. The actors playing said students include Usher (yes, that Usher), Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Jordana Brewster and a couple random chicks that never really did anything else you'd remember! And the teachers? Salma Hayek, that creepy dude from Terminator 2, Jon Stewart (yes, that Jon Stewart) and Jean Grey (I mean, Famke Janssen). It's time for a lesson in out-of-this-world awesome. Or it is awful?

Splice

Photo: allmoviephoto.com

(Hmm...)

Starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley. Directed by Vincenzo Natali. 104 minutes. 18A

Hmm. Odd. Interesting. Very interesting. Splice is a strange film. Its very hypothetical, as all sci-fi films are, but also very relevant and chilling in its possibilities.

Splice tells the story of two biochemists who are also a couple. Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) are experimenting with the DNA of various animals in attempt to develop cures for diseases, including cancer. Along the way, they create two slug-like new lifeforms by mixing animal DNA. They name them Fred and Ginger. While they continue to study their mushy friends, they begin working on a side project, a side project that their company has forbidden them to work on and for obvious reasons. The couple combine the hybrid-animal DNA with human DNA to create yet another new creature. That's when the lines between ethics, legalities and relationships become blurred and the mess begins to snowball.

Should this creature exist? Is this an experiment? Or has this become a relationship? Is this a being that needs to be loved? Or should this creature be killed? And where exactly did they cross the point of no return? These are all questions Splice asks and dances around but is never really meant to answer. It's rather to get the audience thinking these things as Elsa and Clive come to terms with them.

The subject isn't the only quirky part of this film, so are both the lead characters and their relationship. They're obsessive, workaholic scientists with an undying love for each other. They like to eat candy and listen to heavy rock while they work, occasionally sprinkled with some lip action. In their own odd way, they seem like a modern fairytalesque couple.

By far the strangest parts in this film are the sex scenes. Without giving too much away, they are all very awkward and somehow wrong yet hard to turn away from. You want them to happen as much as you don't want them to happen.

This film was also tagged as a horror but it's not exactly. It does have many horror elements but only a very short portion of the film could actually be considered "horror." Instead, the most horrifying thing about the film is the thought that scientists somewhere are creating new organisms. Sometimes they just die but other times they're killed, loved, nurtured, cloned, bred... who really knows. It's strange to think about that world you will probably never have access to.

That's what makes this film so intriguing. It pulls you into a hypothetical world of genetic science and lets you explore, knowing that for now, you don't have to venture into the real horrors of the biochemical world yourself. But it reminds you that they exist and may one day escape. A-