Here’s how to enjoy Splice, Vincenzo Natali’s new Frankenstein flick about cloning human DNA: Instead of the horror film its marketing campaign would like you to believe it is, think of it as a dark comedy about unplanned parenthood—like Juno with less twee dialogue and more CGI. Trust me; that’s the only way to stomach all of its forced “Screw with science and it’ll screw you” irony.

See, while director/cowriter Natali portrays his main characters— rock star geneticists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), who engineer hybrid organisms that look like sentient large intestines —as lab pioneers, I see them as nerds desperate to replace their designer toy collection with a new baby. Where Natali sees their violent, genetically engineered "love child," Dren—an illicit attempt to fuse human DNA with, apparently, that of an ostrich and a walleye—as a manifestation of biological unpredictability, I see her as a rebellious teenager who just wants to dance, wear makeup, and kill things with her prehensile tail. (Parents just don’t understand, indeed.) And where Natali sees Clive and Elsa’s decision to lock their unholy test-tube spawn in a barn as a catalyst for the progressively more disturbing third act, I see an exasperated mom and dad meting out tough-love justice. Hey, why don’t you try pleasing greedy biotech investors and raising a half-human hellraiser?

I’m telling you, the mad science–as–bad parenting allegory could have worked; just imagine what would happen when Dren started dating! But instead, Natali resists its promise to go the clichéd, play-God-at-your-own-peril route—and then abruptly shifts to straight-up monster schlock. (A couple of jarring moments of WTFness late in the film that couldn’t have been included for anything other than shock value don’t help). And in the end, Splice suffers from the same thing that corrupts Dren: a faulty recipe of mismatched ingredients.

Splice opens in theaters June 4.