Summary:
After a convict and his girlfriend take a young couple hostage, a parasitic creature terrorizes them all.
My Thoughts:
When someone recommends a film to me, even if I don’t go out of my way to see it immediately, that film will usually stick out; I’ll try to remember to watch it at some point in my life. This movie was recommended to me probably eight or nine years ago (back when I used to work at a movie theater). I wasn’t as big into horror then as I am now, so I missed this one for a long time. However, as I was scrolling through the endless titles offered by the half dozen streaming services our house subscribes to, the title “Splinter” caught my attention, and upon finding out that the ever-underrated Shea Whigham (“Vice”, “First Man”) starred in it, I was sold.
I’m actually quite glad I watched this movie; while it suffers from a few pacing issues near the middle, the overall story is surprisingly intense, some of the gore effects are pretty awesome, and the creature design is unique and creepy. Overall, this is a solid monster flick; it might not be as epic as “Gojira” or “The Host”, nor as intense as “28 Days Later; it might not be as well written as “From Dusk till Dawn”, or as much bloody fun as “Planet Terror”, but it’s still pretty good.
“It… ah… took half of her.”
Couple Polly (Jill Wagner, “Braven”) and Seth (Paulo Costanzo, “Road Trip”) take a camping trip, but when they can’t get their tent to work, they decide to head for a motel. Along the way, the couple pulls over when they see Lacey (Rachel Kerbs, “Heist”), thinking she needs assistance, but they are shocked when her boyfriend Dennis (Whigham) pulls a gun on them and high jacks the car. After they get a flat on what appears to be a black splinter, the four stop at a gas station, where they find the attendant has been killed by a parasitic creature. The travelers find themselves trapped at the isolated gas station; will they survive or will the mysterious creature kill them all?
So first and foremost I have to mention that this movie owes a huge debt to “From Dusk Till Dawn”, as the storylines are pretty much identical (just replace vampires with parasitic spliter-thingys). In “From Dusk Till Dawn” the Gecko brothers (played by George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino) are two bank robbers making their way to Mexico who happen to take a pastor and his family who were on vacation hostage (played by Harvey Keitel and Juliette Lewis), and then wind up getting attacked by vampires when they make a pit stop. This film is the pretty much the same thing: a couple on vacation is kidnapped by a criminal duo on their way to Mexico, and at a pit stop are attacked by a supernatural or otherworldly thing. The film even goes so far as to name one of the characters Seth, which, I figured must’ve been in reference to Tarantino’s character Seth Gecko. This film’s writing doesn’t have nearly the same bite as Tarantino’s, but there is a fair amount of tension throughout the film.
I think Shea Whigham is the reason this film succeeded so well; he is easily the best actor in the movie, and he’s the only reason I was drawn in to the characters. Jill Wagner and Paulo Costanzo make an incredibly awkward couple, and the first few scenes, where they have to convince the audience that they are truly a couple in love, are some of the more cringe-worthy scenes. After Wagner and Costanzo are kidnapped, and the lovey-dovey stuff takes a backseat, they both do a little better, but that opening scene had me worried about their acting for a minute. Rachel Kerbs does a fine job as Lacey; she wasn’t particularly remarkable one way or the other.
Where this movie really shines is with some of its special effects. The Splinter-creature thingy reminded me a lot of the symbiote from “Venom”- its kind of an oily jet-black shimmery thing that moves its victims in creepy ways. Though I can’t find a budget, I’m guessing this movie was made on a pretty low budget, so some of the special effects look a little worse than others, and the filmmakers tried to hide that by obscuring the creature and shaking the camera. For the most part it works, but there are some scenes when it becomes pretty obvious that the special effects are lacking. There are a few scenes that really look awesome however, like, for example when the splinters get into a hand and break it apart. Part of the hand then uses the splinters to move itself around the gas station, and the result is both fascinating and horrifying; the idea that the splinters can run off any tissue (living or dead) was a kind of cool concept. The filmmakers knew what the restraints of their budget and what their special effects were and they made the creatures work to the best of their abilities; for 90% of the film it worked.
Other than the slightly-schlocky acting by Wagner and Costanzo, my only other big issue with the film was that after the travelers reach the gas station, there’s a good thirty minutes where all they do is look outside and contemplate what to do. It seems like there’s a bit too much waiting around in this movie, but as the overall runtime is only an hour and twenty-two minutes, I can completely understand why they needed to stretch out the scenes to make this film a full-length feature, but it still slowed up the pacing.
Verdict:
Overall this is a pretty solid flick, and pretty darn intense too. I wont say this is a great horror film; it doesn’t seem to have any symbolic themes or deeper character revelations. “Splinter” won’t ever be remembered as a classic, but it is a good monster B-movie with some seriously messed up gore and some pretty cool concepts.
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