Sunday, April 27, 2014

Post Mortem: Splinter

     Splinter, a movie about a malevolent fungus that infests the bodies of living beings and forces them to seek heat while growing long black spines from their bodies. Whats not to love?

     This movie is, in many ways, a lot like Slither in regards that the characters are well developed, the plot isn't predictable as you would imagine and the monster seems to be constantly changing. In this movie, you have two college students, Polly (Jill Wagner) and Seth (Paulo Costanzo) who are going out into the wide open wilderness to camp for their anniversary. After a failed attempt at setting up a camp, they drive off to get a hotel for the night before getting waylayed by escaped convict Dennis (Shea Whingman) and his junkie girlfriend Lacey (Rachel Kerbs). Once they start driving, Seth reveals himself to be in doctoral studies for biology, prompting Lacey to ask if he can write prescriptions. Around this time they run over an animal and pop a tire.
     It's at this point that the movie takes a turn for the strange as the four people, the hostages and hostage takers, get out and change a tire/investigate what they ran over. Lacey and Seth find the body of an animal that, upon closer inspection, lashes out at them. Lacey shoots it twice and runs away screaming, prompting Dennis to find out what is wrong.
     They set off once more and find out that their radiator has been pierced, causing their car to overheat. They stop at a gas station where they look for the attendant, who fell to the vicious mold earlier in the opening credits. He attacks Lacey and then the overheated car, getting shot twice in the process. 
     The rest of the film is the three remaining survivors holing up in the gas station trying to outsmart murderous mold. As lame as that sounds, the film is worth several laughs and a good deal of old fashioned monster scares that you really can't claim to have had since Dawn of the Dead was remade. If you have Netflix, be sure to add this to your DVD queue, or pick it up at the store when you see it in a clearance bin. Seeing as the film is from 2008, it should be an easy find.

No comments:

Post a Comment