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-...

Grafted review – Face/Off-style skin-graft horror has layers of punky attitude

A Chinese student arrives in New Zealand and continues her father’s experimental research in Sasha Rainbow’s cosmetic chiller

Fans of The Substance will probably appreciate this low-budget Kiwi body horror, intent as it is on tearing holes in the human meat carapace in order to question modern beauty standards. Grafted is actually more superficial than Coralie Fargeat’s film in terms of what it says about appearance – but that is somehow fitting and ably concealed by director Sasha Rainbow with a heavy grouting of punky attitude.

Chinese student Wei (Joyena Sun) arrives in New Zealand as an overseas student low on self-confidence, partly because of her facial birthmark. Her father, who also had one, died conducting experimental grafting research; his brilliant daughter – wanting to make him proud and herself beautiful – resolves to pick up where he left off. After she settles in at the house of her cousin Angela (Jess Hong), she gets her opportunity when she is cherrypicked by sleazy lecturer Paul (Jared Turner) to help out in his lab.

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