The fact that ‘Splinter’ won no less than six Screamfest awards doesn’t necessarily mean much, but in this case, they were right to give this low budget horror a bit of respect.

It’s getting harder all the time to find horror flicks that aren’t excruciatingly boring or harrowing in all the wrong ways. ‘Splinter’ is the opposite. Where most horrors these days roll around in cliche and truly stupid scripts, this one actually has a good (if simple) idea, good lines, good performances, and carries the whole thing through with a sense of forward momentum that keeps you hooked to the last frame.

It’s essentially a melange of several conventions. There’s the mutant, ancient, forest-dwelling monster, then there’s the characters: the “nice” city couple clashing with the “bad” drug-fuelled couple. If it had been badly written, this could have been a shocker in all the wrong ways, but the characters are actually well drawn and aren’t reduced to mere cliche and the situations they find themselves in bring out strengths rather than shameful insecurities.

Despite its low budget, this is a winner, and even non-horror fans might just have to accede that it’s possible to do clever, intelligent things with the genre on the evidence presented here.

My only real gripe is with the camera work, which is generally good but during action scenes becomes unbearably shaky to the point that this viewer couldn’t tell what the heck was going on. GARY STEEL

Sound 4

Vision 3.5

Overall 3.5