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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Where the Wind Blows review – a heady mix of gangster lore, lust and lawlessness

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Hong Kong stars Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung Chiu-wai play corrupt police officers in Philip Yung’s ambitious but over-the-top crime epic

This stunning-looking but chronologically restless Hong Kong-set crime epic unfurls across 50-odd years from the mid-20th century; it revolves around two frenemy protagonists, corrupt police officers played here by Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who were inspired by real-life Hong Kong cops/triad front men back in the day. Altogether, it’s a heady mix of potted history, period detail, violence, gangster lore, lust and lawlessness on which writer-director Philip Yung (Port of Call) really goes to town, splashing budget money like petrol all over the place and then throwing a lighted match on top just to see the pretty flames. The ambition and swagger is undeniably admirable, but the end result is a bit of a charred mess – or perhaps more flatteringly a burnt offering to some of the many film-makers Yung (a former film critic) clearly has the hots for, such as Martin Scorsese in gangster-movie mode, early 2000s Wong Kar-Wai and Infernal Affairs’ Andrew Lau among many others.

It’s not always easy to follow the plot; Yung and his team keep weaving back and forth between a yellow-gel-viewed 1970s, black-and-white times when the Japanese occupied Hong Kong during the second world war, and the 60s when colours were at their lushest, the women all wore cheongsams and the men all had razor-sharp tailored suits. But, roughly, here’s the idea: Lui Lok (Kwok) and Nam Kong (Leung Chiu-wai) both hail from very different backgrounds, and are traumatised by the war in different ways. The two men, along with assorted henchmen with funny nicknames like Limpy and Chubby, set a treaty with the triads to keep the peace and get a cut of the money from gambling dens, the drug trade and prostitution.

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