Bone Keeper review – there’s a critter in the caves in serviceable Brit horror

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An unconvincing group of friends is briskly picked off one-by-one while searching for a beastie that hitched a ride to Earth on a meteorite 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-...
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Chuck Chuck Baby review – whimsy and realism combine in big-hearted romance

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Louise Brealey is put-upon Helen, a chicken factory worker who gets a second chance at love, in Pugh’s generous and gritty film

Here’s a rousing empowerment-anthem of a movie that’s not afraid to paint its romance plotline in big, bold brushstrokes; occasionally it overdoes things but the rush of emotion carries everything along in its path, helped by the deployment of radio-friendly standards by Neil Diamond and the like that turns the film into an impromptu musical and allows writer-director Janis Pugh to stage (relatively) elaborate dance sequences and big emotional scenes.

The central figure is put-upon chicken-processing factory worker Helen (played by Louise Brealey) who has a complicated domestic situation: she lives in the same crummy terrace as her oafish husband Gary, from whom she is separated but seemingly not actually divorced, and shares the place with his new, much younger, girlfriend Amy (Emily Fairn) and their newly arrived baby. Also on the premises is Gary’s terminally ill mother Gwen (Sorcha Cusack), for whom Helen acts a carer but is the quasi-maternal figure that Helen appears to long for. There’s also a rowdy Greek chorus of Helen’s fellow factory workers who are perhaps designed as a counterpoint to Helen’s introverted, clenched unhappiness, at least at first.

Chuck Chuck Baby screened at the Edinburgh film festival

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