Where would movies be without mad scientists? With boundless imagination and unapologetic arrogance, they boldly go where no man has gone before -- often with disastrous results. But would we love them as much if their experiments didn’t lead to mayhem and destruction?
This group gets some new colleagues this week with the release of Splice, a film directed by Vincenzo Natali from a screenplay he wrote with Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor. It faithfully follows all the rules of the “Mad Scientist” genre, but ends up being more silly than scary.
The new inductees to the club are Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley), two biochemical engineers whose claim to fame is mixing the DNA of different animals. Their gene splicing cocktail results in an entirely new species. It best resembles a moving blob of chicken fat. But it’s alive and that’s the important part.
Clive and Elsa want to take the experiment to the next level and introduce human DNA into the procedure. Of course, the company that pays the bills is afraid of the “C Word” (cloning). The couple is instead urged to steer the experiments to such trivial things as curing cancer. Of course, Clive and Elsa ignore these instructions and do the experiment anyway. Of course, it is successful, resulting in a creature that looks human but has enough animal parts (including, at one point, wings) that you’re suppose to think, “Oh, isn’t this creepy, but in a cool kind of way.” Mulling over the idea of parenthood, the couple starts to treat the newly hatched experiment as a child. For reasons of plotting only, the creature ages rapidly. In a few weeks it (or is it she???) grows into puberty (as played by Delphine Chaneac). As it starts to struggle with the emotions of a burgeoning tween, things really begin to get complicated.
Will the experiment be successfully or will Clive and Elsa’s lofty ambitions lead to their downfall? “What’s the worst that could happen?” both Clive and Elsa spout in typical mad scientist fashion at various points during the film. Of course, you know the answer to this.
But how well will you know the answers to these? Below is a collection of memorable sayings from some of Hollywood’s best known mad scientist movies. Your challenge is to match the quote to the film in which each was said. The films are in chronological order... the quotes... not so much. Hopefully, you won’t go mad trying to solve this. But if you do, try not to do anything silly... like go see “Splice.”
Thursday, June 3, 2010
THE QUOTES
1. “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
2. “People just don't like teachers blowing up their kids!”
3. “I meddled in things that man must leave alone.”
4. “Oh my God. Do you know what this is? This is a dinosaur egg. The dinosaurs are breeding.”
5. “For what we are about to see next, we must enter quietly into the realm of genius.”
6. “I never saw anything like it! No footprints! No blood! No sign of a struggle! The bones just stripped clean like peeling a banana!”
7. “If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious shit.”
8. “I am a machine vastly superior to humans.”
THE FILMS
Frankenstein (1931) A scientist strives to succeed with the ultimate experiment -- bringing a human to life in the laboratory
The Invisible Man (1933) A crazed scientist develops a formula to make himself invisible
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) A mad scientist continues his experiments by attempting to create a mate for his monster
Dr. Cyclops (1940) To prove his finding are valid, a lunatic scientist shrinks his colleagues to miniature size
The Monster and the Girl (1941) After a wrongly accused man is murdered, a mad scientist transplants his brain into the body of a gorilla
Tarantula (1955) An experimental lab spider accidentally escapes from a remote desert facility and grows to gigantic size
Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) An ex-Nazi, mad scientist creates an army of atomic-powered monsters to take over the world
The Tingler (1959) A mad scientist creates a creature that gets stronger by feeding off the fear in humans
The Nutty Professor (1963) A nerdish scientist drinks a potion that turns him into a boorish lothario
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) A scientist creates the world’s most powerful computer, but it rebels and sets in motion a plot to take over the world
The Thing With Two Heads (1972) To save himself, a dying racist pays a nefarious doctor to transplant his head onto another man’s body. Unfortunately, the only available donor is a black man.
Young Frankenstein (1974) The grandson of a mad scientist returns to Transylvania to recreate his grandfather’s experiment
Back to the Future (1985) A loony scientist turns a DeLorean into a time machine
The Fly (1986) A scientist’s experiments in teleportation go horribly wrong when an insect accidentally interferes in a trial run
Jurassic Park (1993) Scientists successfully clone dinosaurs and put them in a theme park
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) A deranged doctor experiments with transforming animals into human beings
Hollow Man (2000) A team of scientists discover a way to make a man invisible, but the experiment causes the subject to go insane
9. “Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic! But SCREAM! Scream for your lives!”
10. “To a new world of gods and monsters!”
11. “You want my brain after I'm dead? Help yourself, mister! Help yourself!”
12. “I have seen the devil in my microscope, and I have chained him.”
13. “It’s alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!”
14. “Williams! If you cut off my head, that'll be murder!“
15. “You do not realize what we have here. In our very hands, we have the cosmic force of creation itself. In our very hands, we can shape life, take it apart, put it together again, mold it like putty.”
16. “You don't make history by following the rules, you make it by seizing the moment.”
17. “The brain always dies first.”
