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

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-...

Jules review – Ben Kingsley helps an alien in likably folksy twist on ET

As a widower with dementia, no one believes a UFO has crashed in Milton’s back yard or that he’s caring for an extraterrestrial – until his neighbours find out

Screenwriter Gavin Steckler and director Marc Turtletaub have given us this goofy, likable new twist on ET. In the Mathison/Spielberg classic from 1982, the visiting extraterrestrial found safety within the secret world of children, whose existence is beneath the grownups’ notice. Now the space alien finds himself protected by old people, who are used to being patronised and ignored.

Chief among the alien’s allies is Milton, played by Ben Kingsley, an ageing widower in whose back garden his spaceship crash-lands, and who, with instinctive neighbourly kindness, welcomes the mute, hairless naked interplanetary creature into his house. Milton has dementia, and so when he tells locals that he is having to get extra food in for the alien, no one pays much attention other than to relay this apparently sad and upsetting news to Milton’s grownup daughter Denise (played by Zoë Winters, who plays Logan Roy’s assistant and mistress Kerry in TV’s Succession). The scene in which Milton fails the dementia test in the doctor’s office is genuinely sweet and sad due to the fact that it could have taken place in an entirely different, serious film.

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