Movies
Bone Eater (V)
“Blatantly cartoonish, frequently boring, occasionally nonsensical, BONE EATER is the ultimate Saturday morning mindwipe.”
I was addicted to Saturday morning cartoons well into my teenage years; I wasn’t one to sleep in until 9, catch an hour of Bugs Bunny, and then head to the mall. Hell, no; I was up at 6am, ready to commit to the entire 5 hour block, Smurfs and all. So when I fired up BONE EATER at 8am Saturday morning, a sort of warm nostalgia overtook me. Blatantly cartoonish, frequently boring, occasionally nonsensical, BONE EATER is the ultimate Saturday morning mindwipe.
The movie limps back and forth between two parallel storylines that refuse to intersect for what seems like hours. In the first narrative you’ve got a giant bone creature, for the sake of argument let’s call it a “bone eater”, awakened from its slumber by a trio of inept construction workers who start taking apart some excavated human bones with a pick-axe. Bone eaters, especially bone eaters based on nonexistent Native American legends, don’t like it when you fuck with their buried bones, a lesson the construction guys learn the hard way when the bone eater throws bones at them, which makes their bodies disintegrate into computer generated dust. Pretty cool, eh?
But then there’s the second, decidedly shittier storyline, the one featuring Sheriff Bruce Boxleitner trying to make amends with his estranged, perpetually cleavage-bearing 17-year-old daughter, AND keep the crusty landowner Mr. Krantz from bullying the local Native Americans. Boring shit, like an ultra slow episode of PICKET FENCES, but with Bruce Boxleitner instead of Viper from TOP GUN.
BONE EATER shifts back and forth between the two perspectives: shots of the bone eater riding a big bone stallion (NOT a sexual euphemism, believe it or not), or disintegrating a group of archeological students into dust by chopping them with his big bone sword, all of it rendered in riotously bad CGI; and then a neck-breaking narrative shift to Boxleitner, trying to keep his trampy daughter from humping the local thug, or bracing the grouchy Mr. Krantz for information. Stick around long enough and you can be fairly certain that the two story lines will eventually converge, and you can probably count on hearing a completely perfunctory bone eater origin story. And maybe, just maybe, if you really have patience and continue to watch despite all logic and instinct, you’ll see Boxleitner dress up in full Native American garb—feathers and all—to face the bone eater in a final battle of tribal dominance and dubious visuals.
A contemporary reimagining of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story Herbert West: Reanimator is on the way, and Deadline has unveiled the first look at the new Herbert West and the pathologist drawn to his orbit.
Adam Simon (The Haunting in Connecticut, “Salem”) and Tim Metcalfe (The Haunting in Connecticut, Kalifornia) penned the script. The original screenplay and storyline come from Jade Sandberg Wallace.
Michael Grossman (“The Originals”, “Pretty Little Liars”) directs.
The new images introduce star Joseph Morgan (“Vampire Diaries“), who plays “brilliant surgeon and scientist Herbert West, who is obsessed with creating a serum to reanimate the dead.” Katie Cassidy (Speed Demon) stars opposite as the pathologist with a troubled past who joins his efforts.
Together, they prove that conquering death may be the ultimate sin against life itself.
The film’s official synopsis: “As a child, Herbert West watches his father Peter reanimate his dead mother Judith in a secret basement lab — only for Judith to mortally wound Peter and nearly kill Herbert before Peter shoots her. The trauma leaves its mark on Herbert, but so does one final image: his mother’s finger, twitching after death. Thirty years later, Herbert West is a brilliant, secretive surgeon still chasing his father’s obsession.
“Pathologist Kate Locke arrives in town and is drawn into his orbit — first through a spark at a hospital fundraiser, then through his secret lab, where he reveals a serum capable of reanimating severed tissue. Kate, hiding a dark past of her own, is thrilled rather than horrified, and moves into West’s mansion to work alongside him. Their early experiments on a cadaver succeed only briefly. West concludes that dead tissue is the problem — they need something fresher.”
Supporting cast includes Scott Aiello, Ira J Amyx, Randall Newsome, Emma Reinagal, James D. Bryce, Kathryn A Bentley, Jack Lancaster, Amy Holland Pennell, John Pierson, Mindy Shaw, Eric Dean White, Tristan Wilder Hallet, Adrienne Lamping, Aaron Crippen, and Drew Patterson.
Makeup artist Jeff Lewis (“Star Trek: Voyager,” “Star Trek: Enterprise”) and cousin Roger Lewis are heading the production via their newly established Woodlake Entertainment.
Lovecraft’s short story, first serialized in Home Brew magazine in 1922, is the first among his works to mention the fictional Miskatonic University. It was most famously adapted into a 1985 horror movie from Stuart Gordon, starring Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West.
Herbert West: Reanimator is set in Alton, Illinois, where production is now underway.
Herbert West: Reanimator. Photo credit: Matt Lief Anderson
You must be logged in to post a comment.