The debut feature film from former visual effects artist Toby Wilkins is a surprisingly lean, no-frills affair that adds a few new wrinkles to the well-worn zombie film. Kai Barry and Ian Shorr’s screenplay doesn’t waste much time in setting up back stories or offering explanations and the film is all the better for that – after the bare minimum of set-up it just cuts to the chase and puts its small and rapidly diminishing group of characters through the grisliest of mills with joyful abandon.
Dennis (Shea Whigman) and Polly (Jill Wagner ) are on a camping holiday that they are forced to abandon before its even begun when they accidentally ruin their tent. En route to a motel, they are hijacked by a pair of escaped cons, Seth (Paulo Costanzo) and his junkie girlfriend Lacey (Rachel Kerbs) but things get even worse when they run over an unidentifiable forest critter that till manages to move even though dead and is shedding tiny splinters, one of which gets into Seth’s hand. Arriving at a remote gas station Lacey is killed by the attendant (Charles Baker) that we’ve already seen messily attacked by the strange animal they’ve just run over and the surviving trio are soon holed up in the attached convenience store besieged by an ever-changing monster that has metabolised the blood of its victims, animals and human, and is desperate to get at more of the same.
Splinter isn’t the sort of film that changes the genre or starts any new trends but it is a fantastically made and compelling monster movie that takes lots of old tropes and shakes them up a bit, stirring them together into something far from original but nevertheless a lot of fun. Though some of the supporting cast (which also includes Laurel Whitsett as a sheriff who barely manages to pull out her gun before the monster takes her) don’t last long enough to make much of an impact, the lead trio are extremely good, breathing a degree of life into strictly stock characters. Their chief distinction from similar parasite fodder in other films is that they’re unusually smart. Not everything they try in their attempts to escape the convenience store they’re trapped in actually works but at least they think things through, consider all the possibilities before doing something potentially stupid or dangerous. No rashly running off into the dark screaming, waving a gun and hoping for the best for this lot.
The monster is an impressively imaginative beast – it owes a clear debt to the amorphous alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) but its life-cycle is nicely developed (it helps that Seth holds a biology PhD and can fill us in on what he thinks is happening) though we never actually find out what it is or where it comes from. Which is no bad thing really. Like much else in the script, no explanation is deemed necessary and rightly so – none of the characters have enough information to work out what’s really going on so nor should we, though there’s a possible hint at the start of the film as Dennis and Polly drive past a sign posted by “Mid-State Oil, Inc warning trespassers to “keep out… experimental extraction field site”…
There are those scourges of modern cinema, the wildly over-active camerawork and ADD editing to contend wit during the action scenes, but we can perhaps overlook them this time. The clever dialogue, likable characters and ingenious bio-monster are enough to keep the interest. Some of the effects may be a bit shaky (blame the restricted budget) which may explain why Wilkins felt the need to hide them behind all that wobblycam stuff but the gore is mostly fun and suitably horrible.
On the basis of Splinter, Wilkins was offered The Grudge 3 (2009), the third in the series of American remakes of an already convoluted series of Japanese films and videos. Sadly it wasn’t as good, Wilkins constrained by the strictures of a franchise that had run out of steam after the first film. His work since has mostly been in television (including episodes of the small screen Teen Wolf in 2011) and one can only hope that someone has the good sense to finance another low-budget genre film that he actually cares about.
The EOFFTV Review 