Splinter

Released by: Magnolia Films
Released on: 4/14/2009
Director: Toby Wilkins
Cast: Paolo Costanzo, Jill Wagner, Shea Whigham, Rachel Kerbs
Year: 2008
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The Movie:

Better known for his work as an effects technician, British born filmmaker Toby Wilkins has, with Splinter, crafted an interesting mix of Cronenberg inspired body horror served alongside healthy doses of increasing paranoia and claustrophobia a la John Carpenter's The Thing.

The movie follows a curly haired PHD student named Seth (Paolo Costanzo) and his pretty blonde girlfriend Polly (Jill Wagner) who decides to celebrate their anniversary by going camping. Despite the fact that Seth's a bit of a klutz and not at all the camping type, they head into the woods where they decide to do the right thing and stop to help a stranded girl at the roadside. Bad move. Her boyfriend comes out with a gun and the pair gets carjacked.

As luck would have it, the carjackers are an escaped convict on the run named Dennis (Shea Whigham) and his meth-head girlfriend, Lacey (Rachel Kerbs). The four run over a spiky creature in the road and, after changing tires, stop at a gas station where Lacey decides to use the restroom as a place to get high. There she finds the corpse of the gas station attendant, the victim of the same sort of spiky thing they ran over on the way there. It turns out that spiky thing is a bit of a symbiotic killing machine that infects and partially absorbs anything that gets in the way of it and its food supply. The four travelers find themselves having to work together under less than ideal circumstances, trapped in the gas station with no way to get help and an increasingly angry beastie outside wanting to get in…

Moving along at a pretty brisk pace and containing some rather punchy scenes of nasty violence, Splinter may not have much going for it in the way of originality but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun. Sure, it borrows from Cronenberg and Carpenter maybe a little too liberally but at least it does it well and hey, if you're going to pilfer, why not pilfer from the best, right? Wilkins' film wears its influences on its sleeve and it's all the better for it. You won't have the least bit of difficulty figuring out who is going to life and who is going to die nor will you really be surprised by much of what you see but the traditional (read: non-CGI) monster effects more than make up for that and this film really feels like a throwback to the horror movies of the eighties in the best way possible.

Performance wise, the cast of relative unknowns are all fine in their respective roles. No one really stands out as remarkable but the casting feels right and you won't have any problems believing the actors in their parts. The real reason to watch the film though isn't the acting, and it's certainly not the story - it's the monster effects. Again, to compare it to The Thing, the creature has got this wonderfully unsettling twitchiness to it as it goes about absorbing and incorporating 'found' elements of its victims into its evolving form and this monster has a rather imposing physicality to it that trumps all but the most impressive of its CGI counterparts seen in other recent horror films.

It's predictable, it's a bit cliché ridden, and it's derivative but I'll be damned if Splinter isn't a really good, gory, tense monster movie that makes for a really fun ninety minutes.

Video/Audio/Extras:

The VC-1 encoded 1080p 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer has nice color reproduction and decent black levels and it looks pretty good despite some noticeable (though very minor) digital noise that pops up throughout the movie. Skin tones look lifelike and realistic and while some minor compression artifacts can be spotted here and there, you won't notice any problems with edge enhancement to report on. Print damage is minor, which makes sense as this was shot on high end HD-DV, and generally the picture, while not reference quality, is at least clean and stable. There's good depth, strong detail levels, and nice colors.

The English language DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix delivers pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a movie of this type - surrounds are used well in the action/horror/attack scenes and your subwoofer will punctuate the hits and monster noises quite effectively. Levels are well balanced and there are no problems with hiss or distortion to complain about. Dialogue is clean and clear and directional effects are handled nicely, helping to fill in the various martial arts set pieces nicely. Optional subtitles are supplied in English, French and Spanish.

Magnolia has thrown in a pretty decent array of supplemental goodies, though the quality of said goodies varies. First up is a commentary track with Toby Wilkins who is joined by cast members Paolo Costanzo, Jill Wagner, and Shea Whigham. It's an okay talk that plays it very straight throughout as the participants cover just what you'd expect them to - plot points, characters, shooting conditions and what they like/dislike about the movie. The second commentary, where Wilkins sits alongsidehis director of photography Nelson Cragg and his editor David Michael Maurer, is a more interesting discussion as it's considerably more technical. If you want a good primer on what it's like shooting on DV with a modest budget and how to get things right under such circumstances, you'll find this worth sitting through.

From there, we move on to a host of brief featurettes running from one and a half for four and a half minutes in length and starting with The Splinter Creature which is the best of the bunch. It's a quick look at the design work and subsequent effects work that brought the beastie to life for the film. Creature Concept Art Gallery is basically a running slide show of monster art created for the picture while The Wizard shows the film's pyrotechnic expert, Pat Henderson, blowing things up as safely as possible. Building The Gas Station shows how the production team, well, built the gas station where the movie plays out, while Shooting Digitally is a talk with Wilkins about the how's and why's of shooting with a digital camera as opposed to working with film. Oklahoma Weather is a quick piece about the problems that mother nature caused for the cast and crew while the production was in progress, How To Make A Splinter Pumpkin is a bit about how to make a splinter pumpkin (the title says it all) and, last but not least, HD Net: A Look At Splinter is an EPK style high gloss commercial for the film disguised as an interview with Wilkins.

Trailers for a few other Magnet releases are included as are animated menus and chapter stops. None of the extra material is in HD, however.

The Final Word:

While most of the extras are little more than fluffy promo pieces, the audio and video are quite good and the feature itself, while at times more than a little derivative, is an entertaining and at times surprisingly gory picture worth seeing.