Zombie movies are old hat. An old, half-chewed hat which nobody wants to put out of its misery because it's a beloved hat, but eventually it will transform and devour us all. The undead have reached a pop cultural saturation point, what with the abundance of movies, TV shows, video games, and mobile phone games featuring hordes of ghouls that are out to eat the flesh of the living. To be perfectly honest, they're not really scary any more. How can something so ubiquitous be so scary? It'd be like being scared of air, or PPI insurance adverts. To make zombies scary, you need to do something fresh and new with them. Which is exactly what Splinter does. This neat low budget Canadian movie from 2008 centres on a trio - a couple on their honeymoon and a criminal who's taken them hostage holed up in a remote service station where something is happening to the people around them. They're being transformed, but not by the usual shakily-explained zombie virus: instead, they become riddled with black splinters, which cause their bodies to movie all herky-jerky Thunderbirds style and, obviously, violently attack anybody they come across. The conceit is inventive, the single location is fantastically claustrophobic, and you'll never look at an Esso the same way again.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
