THE BONE SNATCHER (2003) Bone? Snatch? Not what you're thinking... You may have guessed, I have more fun watching the really awful movies than the ones which are, as they say, meh. Yes, indeed it is easy for me to call the hard work and financial risk of hundreds of people crap from the safety of a fairly innocuous website. It's not that I'm unaware of the tremendous toil that goes into even the worst movies. It's just that if all that work went into building a bridge, and the bridge fell down, I'd laugh at that too. It's because I'm smart-alecky. The Bone Snatcher is one of the meh movies. There are some neat ideas and images to it, and everybody seems to be giving it their most adequate but it never much rises beyond its well-deserved direct-to-video obscurity. It is however far better than the last couple of South African horror movies I've seen...which is to say, nowhere near as much fun if you're a smart-aleck like me. One American (Scott Bairstow) and a bunch of Afrikaans head out to the desert in a huge truck loaded down with many big tanks of gasoline (bet those'll come in handy) to search for the previous Afrikaans who didn't come back. They encounter a creature (of sorts) with a Monstervision that basically looks like Riddick's. The black guy warns them about how his people have a legend of a terrible doom that will reclaim what's his/hers/its blah blah blah...should not have ventured where mankind was not meant to tread...gotcha. Small pains are taken to demonstrate that this crew has their shit together and won't just fall apart into panic when the script calls for it, except for the old-timer who's just enough of a douchebag that you know he's only here to make you smile when he dies. The same cannot seem to be said of the lead, who at one point is seen snowboarding down a sand dune (last posting: Vancouver. Go figure.). Rachel Shelley makes for a sexy heroine though. I didn't understand how the seismic device can be used to double as a monster detector, and I never did get straight just why the creature needs human bones. I mean, I see what it's using them for, but why does it bother? Few will find much cause to hate this movie, and I think fewer still will find much reason to love it. It's just sort of there. Desert horror enthusiasts might be interested in this, if there's really an audience for anything called "desert horror". BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE