You get the measure early on of the tentacled predator in this British horror film when it makes mincemeat out of a hairy tough-guy Neanderthal. The movie opens with some punching-above-its budget special effects explaining the origins of the flesh-eater, which crash landed on Earth with a meteorite. Like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, it’s a creature that makes its home in caves – though unlike the earlier movie, Bone Keeper lacks a sense of sweat-trickling-down-your-back claustrophobia, despite a couple of good scares.
Sarah Alexandra Marks plays Olivia, whose journalist grandfather vanished in the 1970s while investigating reports of a creature in a cave somewhere in the UK. Now years later, Olivia’s mother has disappeared while searching for him. So Olivia heads to the caves with a group of mates, who feel as if they’ve been dreamed up in a 20-minute character development brainstorm, though it doesn’t matter too much as they are about to be briskly picked off one by one. The direction is pretty crude in places as the gang heads to the caves, with a semi-famous YouTuber hitchhiker called Ashley (Sarah T Cohen) along for the ride.
The creature they find down in the caves is a variation on horror critters you’ve seen in other movies, but deserves points for delivering a couple of jumps in spite of some shoddy CGI. It all adds up to a serviceable horror that at times feels like a B-movie without the fun, containing scenes that could almost work as a spoof – like the pub full of scowling locals warning the group out of town, or John Rhys-Davies hamming it up nicely as Prof Harrison, the village’s expert on the creature. There are also a few plot craters bigger than the hole left by the meteorite.
Bone Keeper is on digital platforms from 6 April.