Monsters' ball

Movie monsters thrive during monetary troughs. And there are lots heading our way, with Predatorsand Spliceabout to pounce. TARA BRADYon the films that tap into society's fears

FOR FILM geeks, the current global economic crisis began in 2007, when Joon ho-Bong's The Hoststomped out of Seoul's Han river and into our multiplexes. Spurred along by a sense of ecological panic, lurking uncertainty and just a touch of anti-Americanism, the film was immediately acknowledged as a certain sign of impending financial disaster. A Hollywood clone, Cloverfield, followed soon after.

Movie monsters, you understand, thrive during monetary troughs. The US economy bottomed out just when King Kong set about romancing Fay Wray. Jaws developed a taste for teenagers and dirigibles as the repercussions of the 1973 oil crisis reached miserable new lows.

Like their scaly antagonists, monster movies may be chaotic, but they're not entirely random. The cultural impact made by, say, Spielberg's mechanical shark, confirms something more than the well- documented corollary between poverty and fantasy film. If 1956's Godzillaonce gave expression to Japan's atomic nightmare, Jawsdoubled as a handy primer in post- Watergate malaise. After all, when times are tough nothing shouts "don't trust the government" or "we're all done for" quite as loudly as an outsized abomination.

In the wake of Joon’s excellent picture, seasoned fans of gigantic mutations could, theoretically, take solace in the knowledge that bank bailouts and mortgage foreclosures might yield untold generic pleasures. In practice, regrettably, this keenly anticipated wave of destruction has been slow in coming.

"Horror always taps into what's going on," suggests movie boffin Kim Newman. "Last year's Sawsequel tortured unethical loan advisers and health insurers, for instance. However city-destroying monsters are never a boom genre, but a once-in-a-while thing."

We know, nonetheless, that the monster movie is big enough and ugly enough to look after itself: that its DNA finds resilient, deformed expression in the dreamboat vampires of Twilight, the eco-fretting of 2012, and the fanged lady parts of Teeth. But we also know that its classic form – creature features, Frankenstein spin-offs, Tokyo laid waste – is tricky to define and practically impossible to legislate for.

From the brief recession- related resurgence of the late 1970s and 1980s – when Tremorsand Alligatorterrorised audiences, but failed to spawn a viable breed – to such anachronistic projects as Peter Jackson's 2005 King Kongreboot, the monster movie has been characterised by rogue timing and a chequered history.

Until now, that is. Coming soon to a cinema near you: monsters and lots of them. Predators, the latest prequel to the similarly titled 1987 Schwarzenegger shoot-'em-up, opens next week. Elsewhere, Legendary Pictures have just started work on a brand new Godzillaflick and the reliably trashy Syfy channel has confirmed that 1980s teen sensations Tiffany and Debbie Gibson will indeed claw at each other in their upcoming TV movie premiere, Mega Python Vs Gatoroid.

One film, however, stands out from this burgeoning and occasionally baffling vogue. Splice, a tremendous new thriller from Vincenzo Natali (the cult director behind the ingenuous 1997 hit Cube), reanimates the movie monster for a post-human era. An erotically charged take on the Frankenstein myth, the film follows genetic engineers and Wiredcover stars Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) as they set about creating a chimera using their own DNA. Dren, the increasingly human result of their labours, has already breached any number of ethical and moral codes when she reaches sexual maturity, and queasy Oedipal games ensue. Suddenly, HR Giger's genital- inspired creations for the Aliensfranchise start to look cuddly.

"I think its Oedipal aspects are mostly just part of going back to the old Frankenstein story, which has always been more about bad parents than mad science," says Kim Newman. "Scary-kid movies are something else, and there have been a bunch more – The Children, the Omenremake, The Plague– lately. I suspect the zeitgeisty thing there is different from the 1970s, when there was a youth rebellion subtext. Now I think adults are afraid of how clever kids are, how well adapted to new technologies, media or modes of interaction, play and debate which are frankly puzzling to oldies."

There is, nonetheless, something uniquely discombobulating about Splice, a film that marries fears of childbearing, parenting, deformity, incest and genetic experimentation into a Freudian psychodrama.

"It's like ET," suggests Splice co-writer and director Vincenzo Natali. "Except it's ETwith fucking. The Freudian content excited me from the beginning. That was always the raison d'êtreas far as I was concerned. One of my best friends is a geneticist, and I spent a lot of time in Toronto-based labs. Hybrids and chimeras are already a genetic reality. If you look at some of the work they're doing in the UK, my film seems conservative in its estimates. From there, you don't have to venture too far before you wonder about their mating habits. What will happen between us and our post-human offspring?"

The science may be cutting-edge, but Natali, who had to wait for post- Avatarspecial effects in order for Dren to work on screen, has spent 13 years getting his groundbreaking film into a multiplex near you.

“I nearly got it off the ground 10 years ago,” he says, “but nobody wanted to risk it. Every time I pitched it, people were aghast.

“In the end I was glad to wait it out. I’m older and wiser as a film-maker, and the technological advances were enormous.”

Splicehas caused something a furore in the US, where stem-cell research remains a handy rallying cause for such Republican mouthpieces as Sarah Palin. Writing for the Washington Post, the reliably hysterical critic Anne Hornaday dismissed the film as "a thoroughly repulsive science fiction- horror flick that slicks up its B-movie tawdriness with high-gloss production values and two otherwise classy stars."

“I don’t know why,” says Natali, “but Europe and Asia are far more receptive and inventive than the US when it comes to genre films. A lot of it comes down to how films are sold here. Everything is sold on scale and by appealing to the lowest common denominator. When it comes to science fiction, they want pulp and sensationalism, not ideas.”

It seems ludicrous that a whip-smart movie that honours Kubrick and Cronenberg in its stately, cerebral grammar could be written off for its “yuck factor” (Hornaday again), but conservative reviews have dented the film’s fortunes at the American box office.

Will Splice, a film one feels is destined for hip cult status down the line, fare better here?

“I hope so,” says Natali. “But I don’t really mind. Maybe science fiction and horror shouldn’t be legitimate. Many of the genre films I love were dismissed when they were released. Maybe films like Splice are supposed to be underground. Just think of it as punk rock with hybrids.”

Weird science mad men old medicine

Splicemarks out daring new territory for sexual misadventure, but director Vincenzo Natali has also found time to reinvent the movie scientist. As essayed by Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, Splice's boffins wear biker boots and hang anime panels on their wall. "Partly it was an artistic decision," says Natali. "As a director I viewed geneticists and scientists as creative artists, just with different goals to mine. Partly, too, I wanted to emphasise the idea of youthful hubris. Mostly though, having met a lot of these people, I've come to realise that the idea of the scientist as a socially awkward nerd couldn't be further from the truth. In real life, they don't wear pocket protectors."

In this spirit, we salute cinema’s most maladjusted men of science:

M*A*S*H (1970)Donald Sutherland. Elliot Gould. Doesn't matter which surgeon you get in M*A*S*H – they're all nuts.

DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963)Nazi doctor. Need we say more?

EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960)Pierre Brasseur's Doctor Génessier chops up nubile young women in order to restore his daughter's disfigured face.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND (2001)Russell Crowe loses the plot. Then he makes a movie about a schizophrenic mathematician.

DEAD RINGERS (1998)"Gynaecological Tools for Operating on Mutant Women"? Not recommended pre-pap smear viewing.

PATCH ADAMS (1998)Robin Williams treats terminally ill children with an unholy combination of medicine and comedy. Death cannot come quickly enough.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)Denise Williams is a nuclear physicist. The character isn't all that crazed but the notion is positively certifiable.

Predatorsopens on Thursday.

Spliceopens July 23