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 Wrong Paris review – Netflix Bachelor romcom makes few right choices

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Miranda Cosgrove plays a woman involved in some reality show drama in another of the streamer’s many low-grade background watches

One could argue that The Bachelor, the ABC reality juggernaut that has reified Christian-lite dating norms for 27 seasons, should be considered scripted content. The connections can be genuine, and the feelings often real, but the situations are contrived and manipulated, a pioneering brand of deliberately saccharine, hokey and ridiculous in the name of love and for the sake of entertainment. Watching The Bachelor and its spinoffs, as I occasionally have over its two-plus-decade run, is to be baffled, frustrated, annoyed and ultimately hooked. The show, with its in-group rituals and shocking sincerity, casts a strange spell over its contestants and its viewers; if you stick through one episode, you’re liable to start caring about what happens.

No such spell exists for The Wrong Paris, Netflix’s latest attempt to build an in-house Hallmark Channel, in which Miranda Cosgrove plays a single woman who goes on a reality dating show for what Bachelor Nation would call “the wrong reasons”. No offense to the Hallmark Channel, which at its best can be laughably unserious fun. But The Wrong Paris, written by Nicole Henrich and directed by Janeen Damian, somehow serves the synthetic sugar of both The Bachelor and the Hallmark movie without any sweetness. The formula is there, but not the flavor, nor the drop of derangement – like, say, a hot snowman brought to life – required to beat the Netflix allegations of low-quality, lowest-common-denominator stuff.

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