Bone Keeper
It was a meteor, scarring the night sky 400,000 years ago, splitting the earth as burning fragments crashed down, something slithering from the crater and burying itself in the deep dark, forgotten and for the most part undisturbed, those who encounter it rarely surviving to tell the story or being dismissed as fools, cranks, fantasists, the Bone Keeper nothing more than a local legend, a tale to frighten children.
Her grandfather David Wheeler a journalist who vanished decades before while investigating the caves where the Bone Keeper is supposed to sleep, her mother Lucy only a child at the time, now she too has disappeared while retracing his steps, Olivia Wheeler determined to carry out her own investigations, enlisting her friends including Ethan, with experience in the Territorial Army, and Ravi, a biologist, hoping local expert Professor Harisson might assist her but only being given a warning that the group should never split up in the caves.
Filmed in Clearwell Caves and the Forest of Dean, Bone Keeper is written and directed by The Ledge’s Howard J Ford, a creature feature horror which had its world premiere at FrightFest at the Glasgow Film Festival, starring Help’s Sarah Alexandra Marks as Olivia, Manor of Darkness’ Louis James as Ethan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s John Rhys-Davies as Professor Harisson, bad-tempered and uncertain to put the greater good ahead of restoring his damaged reputation, stock characters emanating generic emotion.
With Tiffany Hannam-Daniels as BFF Annabelle, Tyler Winchcombe as arrogant Nick, Sophia Eleni as Nadia and Danny Rahim as Ravi, all are pretty but pretty vapid, none more so than Sarah T Cohen’s vlogger BitchHiker, physically joined to her phone and suffering whenever attention wavers from her, hoping for a haunted castle in Scotland but settling for whatever she can sell to her adoring followers, tagging along with the rich kids carrying the best equipment money can buy but who have no experience other than of getting what they want.
A science fiction horror with no scares or familiarity with science, Ravi performing molecular analysis by sight and offering the insight that the organic residue found in the caves was made by “an organism,” Harisson’s contribution is similarly faux-profound, believing “a cave is the nearest thing we have on Earth to space; there is no day, no night, it’s timeless,” ignoring atmosphere, ecosystem, minerals, gravity, temperature, the passage of time in the same way the film ignores the question of how the creature could have spent millennia snacking on everyone from wayward but well-kempt caveman onwards while avoiding discovery.
Aiming for The Descent only shallower, a Pitch Black space where no one hears screams even though caves tend to echo, with unintentionally hilarious dialogue (“We are sticking together, just in two groups”) and ludicrous decisions (Escaped from the lair of death? Sit down at the cave mouth to catch your breath! In fact, why not go back in to get a keepsake of Missing Mummy?), Bone Keeper serves best as an affirmation that determination cannot overcome a poor script.
Glasgow Film Festival continues until Sunday 8th March
