Enjoyable modern creature feature offers a different sort of creature and benefits from its breakneck pacing. It starts with a bang and there's rarely a let up until its literally explosive finish. It's got a minimum of human characters and mostly confines its action to one major location, an isolated service station where a few people have to hole up. Our monster, theorized by aspiring biologist Seth (Paulo Costanzo) to be a mold or fungus that infects animal forms of life and horribly mutates them, rampages outside while on the hunt for blood.
The very high energy level helps to make up for any flaws. These basically amount to some stupid human behaviour and the unnecessary over use of frenetic camera work and cutting, which this viewer feels rarely ever help a movie, as they only serve to make action scenes incoherent. The two protagonists, Seth and his girlfriend Polly (Jill Wagner) are set up right away as likable characters, and even our two antagonists, escaped convict Dennis (the charismatic Shea Whigham) and his drug addict girlfriend Lacey (Rachel Kerbs) are revealed to be not so bad people. It is fun to watch these characters try to figure out the means of combating the creature and surviving the situation.
The rural atmosphere is entirely convincing, with good on location filming in Oklahoma. There's also enough splatter here to keep the gore lover in all of us happy, with some interesting creature design. The strong forward momentum and many action set pieces result in a pretty engaging little genre flick that runs a trim 82 minutes.
In the end, "Splinter" is the kind of thing that takes the oft used phrase "gets under your skin" quite literally and delivers some respectable visceral entertainment.
Seven out of 10.
The very high energy level helps to make up for any flaws. These basically amount to some stupid human behaviour and the unnecessary over use of frenetic camera work and cutting, which this viewer feels rarely ever help a movie, as they only serve to make action scenes incoherent. The two protagonists, Seth and his girlfriend Polly (Jill Wagner) are set up right away as likable characters, and even our two antagonists, escaped convict Dennis (the charismatic Shea Whigham) and his drug addict girlfriend Lacey (Rachel Kerbs) are revealed to be not so bad people. It is fun to watch these characters try to figure out the means of combating the creature and surviving the situation.
The rural atmosphere is entirely convincing, with good on location filming in Oklahoma. There's also enough splatter here to keep the gore lover in all of us happy, with some interesting creature design. The strong forward momentum and many action set pieces result in a pretty engaging little genre flick that runs a trim 82 minutes.
In the end, "Splinter" is the kind of thing that takes the oft used phrase "gets under your skin" quite literally and delivers some respectable visceral entertainment.
Seven out of 10.