Director Howard J. Ford has had a go at the lot over the past couple of decades, variously delivering independent films on zombies, cannibals, climbing – and now, extra-terrestrials. Moving around subgenres in this way, no wonder there’s been some variability: Bone Keeper (2026) is certainly evidence of that. It’s by no means the first of Ford’s films to start with a rather flawed, even a cliched premise (even by horror and sci-fi standards, the framing device here is pretty preposterous). And, unfortunately, many of those initial issues hang over the film throughout its runtime, even if it’s able to deliver some fairly engaging monster set pieces as it moves things along.
The film starts with a meteorite smashing into earth (via a genuinely effective sequence which looks good) using CGI only briefly, whilst showing us that there’s more to reckon with here than just a natural disaster. The meteorite has brought with it some kind of betentacled creature, which immediately finds its way below the earth’s surface. It re-emerges to eat some of a sheltering Neanderthal family and then – as far as we’re concerned – it hides out, until it becomes the subject of interest for a journalist who goes to investigate the cave system in the 1970s, leaving only a piece of Super-8 film behind (tough stuff, that Super-8 film). Then, there’s an unaccountably long interlude until the journalist’s daughter waits for middle age and then goes to look for clues on what happened to him; she also disappears. Then her daughter Olivia (Sarah Alexandra Marks) decides to go and look for what happened to both her grandfather and her mother, taking a group of friends along with her to investigate.
When they’re on their way to some undisclosed location somewhere in the British Isles, the group pauses to pick up a hitchhiker/Influencer called Ashley (Sarah T. Cohen), despite half of the party not really wanting to; in a very British way, they just grimace through it. This could potentially grant the film an additional found footage layer, given Ashley’s love of mobile recording devices; at least, that seems likely. The film has already managed to bring together analogue and digital tech, so anything’s possible. Before descending into the caves, the newly-expanded group calls on a local expert, Professor Harrison (John Rhys-Davies, whose acting style is very different to his counterparts) who admits that he spoke with Olivia’s mother before she disappeared. With some pretty watertight reasoning behind him, he essentially tells them not to go and doesn’t offer to accompany them either, but of course they still go. Armed with microscopes, mobile phones and very little in the way of spelunking know-how, off they go, to be essentially picked off by a very unfriendly lurking alien creature. That’s…kind of it, honestly.
Bone Keeper clearly has no illusions about how cerebral is is or isn’t; it has the caves, but it’s no Descent and offers rather little in the way of characterisation to justify this expedition, other than Olivia needing to ‘find out’ what happened to two generations of her family by doing the exact same thing which likely killed them. Realistically, a creature which offers no harm to anyone not burrowing directly into its lair might be best left alone, but never mind all that: it wouldn’t be much of a monster movie if everyone agreed to leave things be. Furthermore a film of this kind clearly lives and dies on its creature FX, and as it foregrounds the tentacles from almost the opening scenes, it’s obvious this is where the appeal is intended to lie. On this front, it’s not bad. There’s a fair amount of practical FX, some decent (if derivative) ideas, and the film’s dark environment definitely helps to minimise any CGI-wince; it helps the additional effects as a whole to hold together, keeping them sympathetic, rather than too jarring (though woe betide any filmmaker attempting to pass off AI in a film; the tide, so far as that’s concerned, has already long since turned.)
There are other positives, though. It’s nice to see an ostensibly British monster movie, even though it comes via a slightly disorientating smorgasbord of unrelated regional accents and a place undisclosed in the script (though the film was in fact shot in locations along the Welsh/English border). In any case, the landscape shots are great, and it’s a nice reminder that there’s absolutely no reason why Britain can’t offer up its own cryptids and alternative histories for cinema of this kind. When it comes to the cave shots, of course a whole film team can’t get too deep into these systems, but to its credit part of the film was shot on location and Bone Keeper still manages to create an impression of the group dispersing deeper underground, though this works best initially; some cave locations and scenes do start to become a little familiar as we go.
It’s just that…by the time we reach the midway point, by which the film has settled into a rather unengaging panic – disperse – get picked off – panic – disperse mode, it’s clear that nothing much else is going to happen. We don’t really find out anything which we didn’t know at the start of the film, and nor do we really get the expected different layering of shooting styles from the multiple phone cameras we’re shown going into the cave system with the group (which could be a red herring, or indeed a bit of fun at the expense of the bonus Influencer who joins the party, but in practice this feels like a bit of a waste). Without a sense of real characters with relationships and histories, it’s all a bit weak on the whole. Sure, there are some neat monster-y set pieces – some of which clearly emulate ideas from other films, mind – but they do need to be meaningfully connected by something, and unfortunately here it’s flimsy rationale after flimsy rationale. Massively implausible inclusions (a SWAT team in the English countryside?) compound these issues, as well as flinging in a few unlikely resolutions to wrap everything up by the ninety-minute mark.
It has its moments, but Bone Keeper can’t really do anything to set itself apart from the films it takes for inspiration, and whether or not it’s aiming at a B-movie style, too many aspects feel unconvincing for this to truly make the grade as a memorable monster movie, despite some crowd-pleasing scenes.
Bone Keeper (2026) received its World Premiere at Glasgow FrightFest on Friday 6th March and gets a digital release from 6th April.