Horror Movie Review: The Bone Snatcher (2003)

Written by Malcolm Kohll and Gordon Render, directed by Jason Wulfsohn and starring Scott Bairstow, Rachel Shelley, and Adrienne Pearce. The Bone Snatcher unfortunately commits the cardinal sin in horror. Don’t be boring.

It’s such a shame too as the location (predominately in the middle of a desert) and the monster are both absorbing. Neither is enough to hold the attention for 90-minutes though. That’s where characters come in and The Bone Snatcher drops the ball, hard.

At a South African mine, the workers have begun disappearing. When contact is lost with a diamond expedition, a search team is sent out to find out what has happened.

Once they arrive at the camp, they find the bodies of the expedition. Nothing but bones, all the flesh having been stripped off. What to do? In this film… argue nonstop until the next faceless drone is picked off by the monster that lives out here.

The story is lacking but mainly because its stretched so thin. There’s not a lot of detail to the events that take place which means we’re left with the characters trying to hold the flimsiness together. An insurmountable task as all we have here are walking cliches and stereotypes. It’s a mind-numbing collection that you end up hoping will all fall victim to the monster.

Talking of which, while fleeting, the monster itself looks good. A collection of bugs, bones and ooze. It’s mysterious and deadly, which allows the imagination to run wild. Alas, the movie feels the need to reveal exactly what it is, come the end, and it’s distinctly disappointing.

Those hoping for some great looking gore and violent kills will be left wanting as The Bone Snatcher prefers to have most of its deaths happen in darkness or off-screen. Nice.

Had this been made a couple of decades before, it would have fit in nicely with the monster boom of cinema. It wasn’t though. It came out in 2003, when horror was struggling to find the next winning formula and this was little more than a blip on most people’s radar. It hasn’t aged well but not because of its actual age. Rather, because it is just so lazy and humdrum.