The Bone Snatcher (2003)

Very best movie i ever watch

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I don't believe the producers of this film ever intended it to be taken seriously. Throughout the movie there are such logical weaknesses in the plot (and in the dialog!) that I found myself literally laughing out loud. Like when they kept firing bullets into a swarm of ants. And when they left the vehicle and hiked miles away after they had already been spotted by a rescue plane. That's when it hit me that this whole movie was meant to be taken with tongue planted firmly in check -- pure CAMP at its best. If you watch the movie in that mindset, you'll have a great time watching it. This movie really needs to be shown with someone like "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" chiming in her sardonic comments after some of the particularly ludicrous actions taken by the wretched idiots on the screen. Even an occasional "Oh, puh-leese" would have really contributed to the enjoyment of this firm.

This movie has several things to commend it. Good location, plausible players, decent script, good flow and continuity, nice photography, and a workable music score. All of these add to it. But what they didn't do, and so detract from it, is just as important. And what they didn't do was simple: They didn't bombard the viewer with a lot of bad computer generated special effects. They don't show you much, they leave the horror where it belongs. In the mind of the person watching. The next best thing they didn't do was over act. The players, given their circumstances, come off pretty natural. And thats another big plus. All in all? Given the avoidance of certain mistakes and the proper deployment of whats left ... This is a way cool flick.

I wasn't sure what to expect when this disc arrived as part of my monthly subscription to the William Shatner DVD club. Figured it would be some sort of gore-fest set in the desert (I guess that would be a quick-drying gore-fest) but it actually turned out be pretty suspenseful and not always predictable. As the plot unfolded, though, I couldn't help but be reminded of Michael Chrichton's 2002(?) novel "Prey", in which intelligent nanoparticles swarm and coalesce into various shapes and kill off the characters--scientists in a desert research facility that manufactured the particles--one by one, sometimes briefly assuming the shape of one of their victims. Similarly, Bone Shatcher has intelligent swarms of ants under the control of an intelligent queen swarm and coalesce into various shapes to kill workers from a nearby diamond mine. Visually, this film is a lot like I imagined "Prey" would look as I was reading the book.

I think it's easy to give this movie a little more praise than it deserves. But, if this movie had come out in the 1950s, it would have been a smash hit. Since I'm not really from that generation, I can't fully appreciate them, and I couldn't fully appreciate this one either.The characters don't really know what foot to stand on, and I don't know who to blame, the actors or the script. Even in the face of devastating tragedy, people's personalities don't flipflop as much as the characters did in this movie. The only good moments of the movie come too late and too short to appreciate them. Thought I must admit, the special effects are pretty good for a movie of this type & budget.Without ruining anything, let's just say that the climax to the movie is shorter than and as exciting as, well, this review. And the actual "winding down" ending of the movie - which in typical films lasts but a few minutes - is longer than the actual climax of the film.I hope you have a good imagination - you'll need it to give this movie the extra humph it needs to deserve your attention.