Seth and Polly are a happy couple, out for a night of camping. After they give up far too early on their tent they decide to stay at a hotel instead. Along the way they are carjacked by Dennis, an escaped convict, and his junkie girlfriend, Lacey. While driving not-so-merrily along they run over an animal that flattens a tire and messes up the engine. It doesn’t take long for them to realize that something is incredibly wrong with the animal and hightail it to the nearest gas station. Too bad the attendant is already a host for the same splinter parasite that had infected the critter they hit. Now they’re trapped in a backwoods gas station and must try to survive without being infected or killing each other.

This is exactly what a low budget monster movie should be. Splinter is a true creature feature down to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene where the couple drive past an experimental oil field. That’s the only clue you get to the monster’s mysterious origins.

The splinter monster is sort of a cross between John Carpenter’s The Thing and a 90’s music video (shaky-cam, probably used to make the monster seem “more”, you know?) with a little Evil Dead thrown in. The monster is made up of various body parts of its victims covered in the titular splinters which is what it uses to infect the hosts.

The effects are excellent. Watching the splinters insert themselves and take over body parts complete with bone cracking, twitching and screaming from the host is incredibly cringe inducing. There is enough gore here to please just about everyone. The director, Toby Wilkins, did a great job with what he had. Someone give this guy a bigger budget, I’d love to see what he could do with it.

I would recommend this movie to everyone. It was a fun, tight (82 minutes), monster movie that was both simple and enthralling. This was easily one of the best horror movies I saw in 2008. It’s a shame it didn’t get a wider release.

7 out of 10 amputation scenes that practically made my husband and I dive, hollering, behind the couch.