"The Bone Snatcher" starts out extremely promising, with the introduction of a new and original type of unseen evil as well as with the use of the sublimely isolated filming location of the African desert. Whilst checking pipelines out in the desert, three miners are attacked and killed by a seemingly unworldly creature that devours their flesh and only leaves a pile of half-eaten bones. The expedition crew sent to rescue them discovers that the monster is a superiorly mutated ant-queen, and pretty soon they find themselves trapped in the uncanny desert as well. Director Jason Wulfsohn sustains a respectable level of tension just until the nature of the monster is identified. Immediately after that, the film rapidly turns into an ordinary creature-feature with all the characters dropping out of the survival-race one by one. The second half of "The Bone Snatcher" is unendurably boring; with the inevitable love-story clichés as well as a complete absence of gory murder set pieces. The characters all are insufferable stereotypes that act and say exactly what you predict several minutes in advance. There's the rookie who has to prove himself, the female with brain-capacity apart from her hot looks, the obnoxious experienced guy who redeems himself at the end through self-sacrifice and last but not least who could forget the wise black guy who refers to the monster using all kind of voodoo names. Wulfsohn tries too hard to make his monster look like the outer space menaces of "Alien" and "Predator". The ant-creature has infrared-vision and crumbles when shot at, yawn! The movie actually just benefits from its unique setting and the handful of nasty images of decomposed bodies. This could have been a modest gem, but instead it's less than mediocre. Avoid.
Review of The Bone Snatcher
