Splinter

 Polly (Jill Wagner) and Seth (Paulo Constanzo) are a couple celebrating their first anniversary by going out camping. Their plans are derailed when another couple, Dennis (Shea Whigham) and Lacey (Rachel Kerbs), criminals on the lam, hijack their car at gunpoint.

 The hijacking is derailed in turn when a strange creature attacks the group during a rest stop visit. The being, which manifests as a patch of magnetic ferrofluid that's wont to produce spikes (or splinters, if you like), takes over human hosts and puppeteers them into attacking others, zombie-like.

 This sets the stage for a neat little siege movie as the survivors hole themselves into the gas station shop, try to figure out what they're facing, and find a way to escape without being assimilated.

 There's a lot to like in here. The acting is good, and the characters show some nuance and evolve in interesting ways throughout the night. They also mostly react intelligently to the situations they're put through, and end up being a fairly likeable bunch. 

 The monster, meanwhile, is pretty damn cool. It owes an obvious debt to The Thing - an early scene, where half a hand starts crawling on its own, is only missing a "you've got to be fucking kidding!" comment. But it does enough to distinguish itself - this is not a highly sophisticated monster that can fully mimic humans, just a basic predator that reconfigures flesh and awkwardly strains bone and ligament attempting to spread itself into other unwilling hosts.

 An early scene makes it clear that the infected are fully conscious, even if not in control of their bodies, but this sadly goes unexplored for the rest of the film as the monster only picks up corpses from there on. Its various incarnations are put together with practical effects which seemingly include some pretty cool uses of ferrofluid. The FX are really good for the film's budget bracket, but they're somewhat undone by some Neveldine/Taylor levels of shaky camera work and jerky editing.

 I watched this back when it came out and was completely soured on the film by that: a couple of the creature's attacks are ruined as the camera spasms uncontrollably. This is very obviously a conscious decision to obfuscate the low budget, and to keep the monster out of the frame as much as possible while it performs actions that the FX can't portray.

 Yes, director Toby Wilkins doesn't really find a way to make it look good, but I was absolutely being too harsh on it: it's only a couple of scenes, and justified by external (low budget) and internal (the action is meant to be disorienting) reasons. It also, wittingly or unwittingly, keeps the creature mysterious. In my defense, this came out during a spell where shaky cam was a pox upon action cinema, so I was seriously turned off by it.

 This is an excellent creature feature. It features some top-notch body horror, excellent, likeable, believable characters (a rarity in the genre) and a fun script (by the director, Kai Barry and Ian Shorr) that finds time for a horrifying amateur amputation in between all the monster hijinks and some questionable but fun science-based survival gambits. Sure, it's got a couple of cases of shaky cam and nu-metal, but what are you gonna do... It was the noughties, man.