Honey, I genetically engineered the kids. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley in ‘Splice’.

Better living through genetic engineering takes a serious hit in Vincenzo Natali’s Splice, a seriously creepy and surprisingly effective science-gone-awry thriller. There’s a certain 50’s B-movie sensibility going on here: where films like Godzilla or Them! expressed a public’s fears about the dangers of radiation, creating mutated monsters that threaten to bring down humanity, Natali’s film does the same with gene-splicing. Here, two hot-shot young geneticists, Clive and Elsa (Adrien Brody & Sarah Polley), throw a bunch of species in a DNA blender to try to farm a protein from the resulting organism that can be used to treat a wide range of human illnesses.

But they’re not dealing with microscopic organisms in petri dishes. Where the film takes a turn that feels like it’s descended directly from the early biological horror of David Cronenberg — and Natali’s work doesn’t suffer in the comparison — is that these two are creating an entirely new species, an amorphous blob of a creature, incubated in an artificial, synthetic uterus and birthed into the world as a veiny, brownish lump of flesh.

Also like Cronenberg (and in direct contrast to most of the current crop of hack-em-up horror directors), Natali infuses his chills with smart social commentary. When Clive and Elsa’s experiment goes horribly awry — as you know it has to — the fault doesn’t initially lie with scientific curiosity. The pharmaceutical company funding their research, motivated by a need for an immediate revenue stream from the couple’s expensive work, shuts down the gene splicing portion of the operation in order to concentrate on researching the organisms for that vital protein.