Spliced (2002)

MAY 30, 2012

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX INSTANT)

It’s cute when movies try to play up their “real world” significance. Usually they just say it’s based on a true story and leave it at that, but others put a little more effort into it, like Poughkeepsie Tapes’ exhaustive attempts to make people believe that the killer was real through viral marketing and such. The folks behind Spliced, however, apparently just used the IMDb trivia page to play up their movie-within-a-movie aspect, using plot points about that fake film (called “The Wisher”) and attributing it to the real one. C for effort!

Then again, maybe they realized this would just confuse people and gave up, because that seems to be the extent of their attempts to make it look like Spliced is some sort of mind-breaking horror film. Thus, people who never bother to watch this thing (but read its IMDb page) will forever think that it was banned in two states and sold out for four weeks at a theater in Canada. However, that’s what happens to “The Wisher”, as it’s apparently like a Sutter Cane novel, in that people who watch it go nuts – yet sadly the movie only focuses how it affects a very small, bland group of pals.

Our main girl is supposedly a huge horror fan, yet she doesn’t seem to be too excited about seeing this amazing horror film (it’s been out for four weeks!), which I find odd – I sure as well wouldn’t leave HMAD to her when I quit; I like to give you guys a review for new releases right away! She also only owns rubbish like The Fear 2, so I question her dedication to the genre. Anyway, the night she finally goes to see it with a few pals, she gets freaked out fairy quickly and walks out. Soon after, people start dying, and after like five such deaths she finally figures out that they died after she made wishes. “I wish she could see how ugly she is!” she says about the school’s head cheerleader (read: bitch), and soon after the girl’s face is slashed up. “I wish she would shut up!” she says about one of her pals, and the girl’s throat is cut.

Of course, WE figure this out a lot sooner than she does, which just makes the explanation scene even more obnoxious. Like the Saw films, we see a bunch of stuff from earlier in the movie all over again in a quick cut montage, but in those movies they trust the audience to be smart enough to figure out the context and just play the original dialogue when applicable. Not here; the girl literally repeats every wish and its accompanying ironic death – I suspect she would have written it out on a wipeboard if not for the fact that she’s in a car at the time.

This is right next to a hilariously awful sequence where they try to find a way to stop The Wisher. See, they walked out of the movie and thus don’t know how it ends, and because they apparently don’t have the IMDb or horror movie websites yet, she does the next logical thing – downloads the movie! One must question the mentality of a screenwriter who has his hero illegally download a movie to save the day, but whatever. This leads to a wonderfully stupid scene where the download keeps slowing down or rebuffering, preventing her from getting the info she needs. Just a theory, but I’m guessing if the movie has been sold out for weeks, she probably knows someone that has seen it and can just ask instead of stealing, but what do I know?

Well, I know that Halloween Resurrection is not worth being the only other movie showing for the citizens of Wisher-ville:

Seriously? They four-walled this movie but left a screening slot open for Halloween Resurrection, of all things? That movie was released in the summer, and most of the movie takes place in school, so it has to be the fall of 2002 by now – they can’t be showing Red Dragon, or The Ring? These poor bastards have to drive out of town to see this because the theater manager decided everyone had yet to have enough Dangertainment in their lives? Nonsense!

Anyway, the movie’s pretty bland. The kills are few and far between, and the out of nowhere whodunit angle is far too undeveloped – I actually forgot who the guy was when they unmasked him. I would have preferred it was actually a supernatural entity; it actually makes more sense than a kid following her around everywhere and making her wishes come true. Or, I’d prefer it was Ron Silver, justifying his otherwise useless (and top-billed) presence in the film as her guidance counselor. I mean, I guess it’s actually kind of novel to NOT have Ron Silver be the bad guy, but since his character serves no other purpose; I have to wonder why they bothered casting him.

Oh and when she looks up articles about other incidents caused by the movie, they’re all riddled with typos and horrendous grammar (I’ll ignore that she is clearly opening all of them from an FTP folder of some sort, not a search engine). What a lazy goddamn movie. Even the teens it is aimed at deserve better. Sold out for four weeks? The DVD would be in the dump bin within a week.

What say you?

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