The Bone Snatcher

Good Story With Potential, But Falls A Little Short
I've seen plenty of movies like this one. It has a neat story line in it, but for the obvious reasons that hinder B-movies, it falls short of its potential. "The Bone Snatcher" starts off well enough, with three miners being attacked and stripped of their flesh by some "thing." A group seeks out the three missing individuals and come upon two of their skeletal remains. The third member of the party is accused of murder by one of the search party members. Tracking his footprints, they find his remains as well. They decide to hunt down the real murderer, which leads to a classic B-movie scenario of the team members being picked off one-by-one as the group slowly comes to realize what they are chasing. Though this is considered a horror film, there isn't much to horrify you in this picture.

The actual "Bone Snatcher" creature looks pretty good considering there probably wasn't much of a budget for the flick. Most of the acting is done in a very stiff fashion, though a...

Derivative but highly atmospheric horror
**spoilers**

OK, so the serious horror/sci-fi buff will recognise numerous hat-tips or rip-offs during the Bone Snatcher (Them, Alien, The Thing, Blair Witch, Forbidden Planet, Tremors and many more spring to mind), but it still pulls the right strings and certainly is a well-made, entertaining and memorable movie.

A sandy desolation is not an overused scenario for this genre and I found it made for a delightfully evocative and creepy backdrop to this hefty dollop of grand guignol gore.

The entity, being constructed from human remains is cadaverously grotesque when it finally makes an appearance, and its method of infecting the humans (especially the unfortunate Titus and the poor guy in the sleeping bag) is suitably nasty.

The pace of the move is spot on; an opening shock gives way to a measured section devoted to scene-setting and characterisation, before the real gore-fest begins.

Reasonable acting (although some of the...

Better than expected.
I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. My expectation for watching this was to suffer through bad acting and bad storyline just to get to "the monster". By setting the story in the desert, the production value was spent on the CGI monster and better actors than I thought would appear in a movie like this. To be sure, this is a "B movie", but it performs as well as some of hollywood's mainstream offerings. The cast are all Australian/British and unlike Mad Max or Crocodile Dundee do not have super "over-the-top" personalities. The other movies tend to make you focus on the accents and mannerisms in an attempt to add some value to their storyline. The plot is pretty straightforward: Specualtors in the desert uncover something nasty and get killed. Some reseachers happen upon them and then the fun begins... There are only one or two "cliche" moments in this movie, (the awkward boy-girl kiss) & ("i can't kill the monster, I'm a scientist and I must STUDY it" *hoofa*) which is...

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