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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The Severed Sun review – folk-horror nightmare that harks back to The Crucible

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A widow with an ungodly secret challenges the patriarchal abuse of an oppressive religious community in Dean Puckett’s English chiller

Here is an atmospherically shot English folk horror from first-time director Dean Puckett set in some eerie time of the medieval past or post-apocalyptic future. It’s possibly a bit derivative: there’s a touch of silliness in the Donnie Darko-ish pagan beast-god rustling around in the foliage, and no prizes for guessing who its final victim is going to be. But there are some chills and bad-dream unease as well, effectively delivered by a good cast, well directed.

Among an oppressive religious community in the remote countryside, Magpie (Emma Appleton) is a young widow who is concealing the truth about her husband’s death from the congregation led by her stern father, the Pastor (a potent performance from Toby Stephens). She is increasingly resented as a disruptive influence when she challenges the patriarchy’s abuse, in the form of what she suffered at the hands of her late husband and the violence that she can sense is being perpetrated on a young neighbouring girl by her father, a violence ignored by the girl’s pious mother (Jodhi May). Concealment and hypocrisy are all about: she herself is having an affair with her stepson David (Lewis Gribben), and the Pastor has an unusually close relationship with zealot parishioner John (Barney Harris).

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