BONE KEEPER (2026)

3 stars

Plaion Pictures. Digital. 6th April

The story opens with a meteor crashing down to Earth – strange creatures emerge from the aftermath. 400,000 years ago, cave people are attacked and dragged away…

Our narrator – and main character – Olivia (Sarah Alexandra Marks) tells of her grandfather, a journalist in 1976, who entered the caves and was attacked by the tentacled terror. Her mother went to search for him and is now missing.

Present day: All Olivia has is a journal as a possible starting point to find her mum. Her loyal friend Annabelle (Tiffany Hannam-Daniels) tells her she has called their friends in to help in the quest – Ethan (Louis James) and Nick (Tyler Winchcombe), who appear to have agreed to come along as they think they might get lucky with the ladies, plus Nadia (Sophia Eleni) and Ravi (Danny Rahim), who are there for the science of it.

Along the way they pick up travel blogger Ashley Winters (Sarah T. Cohen) – better known as Bitch-Hiker. Why? Because her posts might draw publicity and they clearly need more fodder for the monsters to come. She is excited that they are going to find out about the legend of the ‘Bone Keeper’.

They meet up with Professor Harisson (John Rhys-Davies), who knows about the cave systems and has her grandfather’s footage from 76. Of course he warns them not to go into the tunnels, but we know they will ignore him.

Before long they are scrabbling around in the caverns – and being picked off one by one by the CGI beasties that reside within…

Whenever there is some cheesy B movie from the 50s released on disc – there are usually excited fans that lap up the latest special edition. I often wonder, whilst watching these modern versions of the monster movies of old, whether in years to come there will be such a fan base for these recent outings. Probably not.

Fundamentally this is a basic creature feature – nothing original, but competently directed by Howard J Ford – who also wrote the script, shot the movie, produced it and cut it together! Rhys-Davies, in an extended cameo, plays the same character he seems to play in every movie and the cast is full of faces that you will probably recognise from various other low budget productions. Once the freaky creatures start to attack, the film does become overrun with computer generated images – which are mostly effective.

Steve Kirkham