SPLINTER
(Review)

Polly Watt and Seth Belzer (Jill Wagner from TV’s Blade and Everything’s Gone Green’s Paulo Costanzo) are all set for camping, both looking forward to some anniversary sex under the stars. But when the tent defies their romantic intentions, they relent and head for the nearest motel, putting them on a collision course with another couple, and placing them on a path that will bring them to the Sherman gas station, and the gruesome thing that awaits there…


Toby Wilkins’ Splinter is a frisky blast of low budget horror that grabs you from the get-go (with a splendidly-edited opening, courtesy of David Michael Maurer), and introduces us to one of the freakiest cinematic beasties from 2008.
Wisely opting to utilize old school physical effects—by Quantum Creation FX—Wilkins amplifies the suspense and tension of the dire circumstances the film’s characters find themselves in as Splinter unspools.
If this had been some bigger-budgeted Hollywood horror flick, the monster might very well have been achieved with CGI, which is still usually a problematic option, as, a lot of the time, the pixels really don’t display any genuine physical presence. It’s hard to get worked up when the onscreen menace is clearly not having any actual interaction with the cast, as with, say, Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend.
In Splinter, the creature is most definitely there, banging and scuttling and flailing about with the rest of the flesh-and-blood cast.*


But Splinter is more than just that horrible beast (co-designed by Wilkins); Splinter is also an involving narrative populated by characters with actual dimension, who surprise us with their humanity, and keep us involved by gaining our sympathy (some, more quickly than others).
Here, the headstrong characters occasionally show their vulnerability, the physically inept step up when the chips are down, and the apparently despicable… well, let’s just say even they’ve got their own story.
And while the cast (which includes Wristcutters: A Love Story’s Shea Whigham, who does a thoroughly bang-up job here) is to be commended for that vital grounding in an essential humanity, the film’s script—by Kai Barry and Ian Shorr—should also be noted.
There’re also some nice bits of scoring in here by Elia Cmiral, who also scored Jim Sonzero’s remake of Pulse.


With Splinter, Wilkins makes quite a shuddering first feature impression, enough that I’m actually driven to check out the straight-to-DVD The Grudge 3—which he also directed—despite my having been underwhelmed by Ghost House’s first two English-language installments. (Wilkins had already previously directed the Tales of the Grudge shorts.)
Here’s hoping Wilkins continues to fly the flag of earnest, low-budget horror in the future, even if he, like other indie horror helmers before him, crosses over into the majors.


* In light of Splinter’s decidedly lo-tech effects approach, it’s interestingly ironic to note that Wilkins is an experienced Inferno/Flame artist.

Parting shot: Reviews of Everything’s Gone Green, I Am Legend, and Wristcutters: A Love Story can be found in the Archive.

(Splinter OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; images courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

EVERYTHING’S GONE GREEN
(Review)

“Man, stop worrying. Your 20’s suck. Worst period of your life. You’re lonely, feel like your head’s being blowtorched from the inside. And you don’t even know what it is because we were never even, like, taught the words to describe it. So you feel like an idiot and a loser, and because everybody else is so young and beautiful, you think they’re having a great time. But the fact of the matter is, dude, they’re just as lonely and scared and f*cked up as you are.”

Douglas Coupland is perhaps best known as the author of novels like Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture, Girlfriend In A Coma, Microserfs, and Microserfs’ spiritual sequel, jPod, but with Everything’s Gone Green, Coupland has, at long last, told a story specifically for the big screen.
Ryan (Paulo Costanzo, from TV’s Joey and the upcoming Splinter) is having a bad day, dumped and fired and thinking his family was this close to 4.3 Gs, all in the span of a few short hours.
But all that dreadfulness is about to change into a sprinkling of opportunities, thanks to a new job and a beached whale.

Director Paul Fox (The Dark Hours) does a bang-up job of giving us what is essentially an audio-visual Coupland novel. It’s all here, from the ruminations on modern life, to the quirky characters constantly finding themselves in off-the-wall situations, all the while making observations about where we are and what we’ve done to ourselves as a species.
Embodying those aforementioned quirky characters is a laid-back cast headed by Costanzo, and supported by War’s Steph Song (also appearing in the TV adaptation of Coupland’s jPod), JR Bourne (from Thir13en Ghosts and The Exorcism of Emily Rose), and Aidan Devine (who appeared in Fox’s The Dark Hours, as well as David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence).
But with all these capable performances on screen, it’s interesting to note that one of the most engaging characters in Everything’s Gone Green, is the city of Vancouver.

Vancouver, BC has long been the shooting destination of choice for American productions that want to keep their budgets on a leash; five of The X-Files’ 9 seasons were shot there, as were both Fantastic Four movies and the two latter X-Men films, while current Hollywood North television productions include Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Reaper, Supernatural, and Bionic Woman. (Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen is also currently filming there; see Afterthoughts (27).)
Serving as both setting and stand-in for the story’s characters and modern life as we know it, Vancouver is constantly something other than what it actually is. It dazzles and preoccupies with its surface glamour, while so much that is left unseen and unnoticed, goes on beneath the surface.

And while this theme is seen in all the other characters in Everything’s Gone Green, it is perhaps most evident in Ming (played by Song), who works as a set dresser, her job, to continually make Vancouver look like some other place.
At a certain point in the film, she moves in with her knife-wielding, Mandarin-speaking Granny (Chiu-Lin Tam, playing the film’s cutest and coolest character), cluttering up the place with random props—fake cacti, fake limbs, fake breasts—from her work.
It isn’t an accident that just as she’s decided to turn a new leaf, to “move forward” instead of back, she moves all of the props, all the inauthentic detritus that clutters her life, into the basement.

Like Coupland’s novels, there’s a lot going on in Everything’s Gone Green, but it isn’t blared out in obvious, overly melodramatic ways. At its core, the film is a funny look at life and what we make of it, and the oftentimes slippery slope that lies between being true to ourselves and going for the quick buck.
Set in Vancouver, a city of magical artifice readily set-dressed to be any other city in some distant corner of the world (sometimes, even galaxy), Everything’s Gone Green is about trying to get through, and get by, pushing to move forward, without cutting corners. It’s about discovering what truly makes you happy, no matter what that is.
And ultimately, it’s a small film that manages to be both beautiful and hopeful, which should make Ming very happy indeed.

“God, does anybody do anything real these days?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone’s in on a scam, or creating something that nobody really needs just to sell it to people who are too stupid to care or notice. Whatever happened to just being real? Why aren’t we content to just be middle class?”

Parting shot: Everything’s Gone Green won the award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

(Everything’s Gone Green OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art [Unrated Version] courtesy of amazon.com; images courtesy of everythingsgonegreen.com.)