The Worst Movie of 2010

By: Dafs

Around the Monster blog and pretty much every media site on the Internet, people are trying to pinpoint the best movies of 2010. But for my money, there’s not enough talk about the worst movie of 2010. Many of you know that I recently saw The Little Fockers with my fiance's family. This was NOT the worst film of the year. It was not good, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was exactly what it advertised itself as. Yes, there is a horrible scene where Ben Stiller injects medicine into Robert DeNiro’s pharmaceutical enhanced erection in front of his screaming child, but that scene was also in the trailer. People who paid to see The Little Fockers went knowing full well (some even excited) that they would see such a tableau. Such was the not the case with the worst movie of 2010, a science fiction film called Splice.

I already wrote a little bit about Splice right after I saw it back in June. Val and I had spent the day in Charleston and we were looking for time to kill before we went home, and we opted on a movie. She suggested the film, having gotten interested in it because of the commercials. I was also a little intrigued, which is why two hours later when she profusely apologized to me for subjecting me to such a horrible film, I told her that I would probably have seen it anyway. We were no strangers to bad film. We’d walked out of stuff like Pulse and The Tale of Desperaux, but this was something new. This was a film that lied to you. It lured you in with an interesting premise, developed its characters, and then halfway through took a severe left turn to Batshitville. And while you were busy sorting out your emotions from that most recent visit (was that last scene funny? sexy? disgusting?), it drops everything out from under you by dropping any sense of fun that could possibly be had and focuses on being as repulsive as it possibly can. It mixes cartoonish mayhem with some very nasty real-world violence that leaves you feeling like you just bathed in vomit.

Some of the kinder professional reviewers wanted to call it a psychological drama or a thriller, but these are more for the long moments where nothing happens. The film doesn’t stray far from the horror field, and I can’t help feeling like this is part of a class of horror that I can’t get behind. In many ways, it reminds me of 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, which was equal parts ridiculous, and more sophomoric in its sense of humor. And of course, we can’t forget this year’s biggest gross-out experiment The Human Centipede, which apparently had trouble delivering even what it promised without being boring. It wasn’t a good year for horror: Crazies was boring, the new Nightmare made me suffer from micronaps, and the Saw franchise dropped another turd (but this time in 3D! Its like the brains are actually spraying on me!). The rule right now seems to be “ramp up the repulsion and leave the ending vague enough for a sequel”, which is definitely one that Splice follows.

Speaking of vague, I realize that I’ve been stepping around giving spoilers. That’s because I think its important that you THE MONSTER RAPES SARAH POLLEY AND GETS HER PREGNANT. There. Now you don’t have to submit to that small spark of curiousity that was growing in the back of your head. When I heard JTalbain talk about how awful Splice was, I was in the mindset of The Happening. That it was a bad movie that can be enjoyed for how shitty it is. Splice is not like that. You should not subject yourself to it. This movie is toxic, and six months later, my eyes are still burning.