In theaters this weekend, producer Guillermo del Toro shocks audiences with his visions of a human-animal hybrid in the movie Splice. The monster is born from the work of two rogue scientists played by Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley. The romantically-involved researchers splice human and animal DNA to create a creature that truly tests the descriptive powers of the nation's film critics. We've compiled the most creative, elucidating descriptions of the monster from around the Web:

• "Some horrible thing that starts out looking like a chicken with a baby's head and then grows into some terrifying bald girl with pretty eyes and ghastly birdlike legs," writes Mick LaSalle at The San Francisco Chronicle.

• "What they create looks like Sinéad O'Connor in her 20s but with freaky eyes, four fingers, a tail, and the legs of a kangaroo," says David Blaustein at ABC Radio News.

• "Part human, part various animal species, she’s got strangely beautiful aquatic eyes, muscular three-jointed legs and a long, sinuous tail with a poisonous stinger," writes Anthony Kaufman at The Wall Street Journal.

• "First it's a pile of flesh with eyes on either side of its head. Then, quickly, since its growth is accelerated, it begins to look humanoid, albeit with other components, from amphibious to avian — plus a long tail with a lethal spike. It has no language you'd recognize — clicks and rattles and chirps," writes David Edelstein at NPR

• "A hairless, E.T.-like creature, she seems to be cobbled together from a harp seal, a deer, an albatross and Polley herself, who possesses the same lambent dark eyes and ethereal pallor," writes Ann Hornaday at The Washington Post.

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John Hudson