Dir: Toby Wilkins
Year: 2008
Cast: Shea Whigham, Paulo Costanzo
Genre: Creature Horror/Thriller
Cert: 18
Splinter begins with a gas station attendant being attacked by some sort of wild animal, seemingly killing him. The main story is about a couple, Seth & Polly, who embark on a camping trip. After deciding to just grab a hotel they make their way to the nearest one, along the way their car is hijacked at gun-point and they're made hostages by another couple, Dennis & Lacey, who are desperate to get to mexico in order to defeat Lacey's drug habit. Along the way they accidentally drive over an animal the destroys the tire, they discover it's some sort of dog with massive black splinters sticking out of it. Seemingly dead it spasms back to life and attempts to attack them. They scatter back to their car and drive out of there at top speed, making the car over heat and leaving them at an isolated gas station. They go in to discover it's empty and are then attacked by the attendant who is seemingly being controlled by a parasitic creature that absorbs the corpses of the people it kills with its splinters. Trapped inside, they all must find away to escape the creature from spreading the parasites and being killed.
I thought this was an absolutely brilliant and highly original horror movie. It managed to get the right amount of gore and violence with a steady and genuine intensity, much like The Thing. I felt it was very reminiscent of the The Thing in many ways. A group of people isolated trying to fight off an infectious parasitic creature. What I particularly liked that it wasn't very predictable and managed to use the right amount of violence, without being over the top or trying to hard on grossing you out with stupid amounts of gore. Though one bit was fucking rancid and lets just say, it contains the most painful bone breaking sound effect you'll ever hear. Another thing I really liked and made it quite original, is rather than having something infected and fully functioning, i.e a zombie can walk and move like a person and even the people in The Thing who were infected, still moved and acted like normal. In this, its as if the body is completely dead and the parasite is doing all the work, instead of a creature using its arms to bang on the glass, it just hurls its body as hard as possible against it, completely lifeless and just made it seem more rabid and intense. I thought that brought the intensity up a lot as well as the silence. when the creature is moving, every noise had the characters on edge, and it thankfully didn't use that bullshit scare tactic of having something jumpy just to get a scare rather than relying on atmosphere. This did everything that horror movies now-a-days should do, focus on characters and atmosphere and story. The only real problems I had with it were 2 characters. Seth, simply because he was that annoyingly unrealistic genius that was lucky enough to be caught in that situation and always knows the right thing to do. That Paulo Costanzo chap seems to be type cast as a nerd in everything... And the other character that bothered me greatly was Sheriff Terri Frankel, she was that typical character in horror movies that is just infuriatingly ignorant. Being told that they're in great danger by the people she's trying to help and told to get back in her car or else she's fucking dead, and she just stands there like a goon, dismissing everything they say. As if she's the adult ruffling the hair of a kid who saw a giant octo-wolf in the woods, not believing a word of it and making them seem silly. Those were the only parts really I can remember not liking.
It's definitely one of the best horror movies I've seen in a long while and I would highly recommend it to horror fans, especially fans of The Thing.
Unfortunately, the director, Toby Wilkins went on to direct The Grudge 3... I would avoid that pile of dog shit and go straight for this. I believe he's behind the new Teen Wolf show too. Hopefully he'll go back to making brilliant indie horrors like this instead of shitey Twilight wannabes and muck Asian remakes...
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