Bone Keeper Movie Review

Raised in Bradbury Country (Waukegan, Illinois), Justin has published a short story collection and is a Rondo Hatton Award-winning horror journalist ('Remembering Sir Christopher Lee', 2016, Ravenous Monster). When he isn't reading, writing or watching horror, he can be found talking to himself or his awesome black cat, Boo. He's been a RavMon contributor since 2011. He's been a horror fanatic since his mother showed him The Exorcist when he was seven. Thanks, Ma.

A promise of cosmic horror and dangerous caves will always have me seated for a horror film. So, when our esteemed Editor-in-Chief offered me the chance to check out 2026’s Bone Keeper, I dove right in. Or perhaps, spelunked right in is more apropos here?

The trailer teased a promising mix of Lovecraftian mythos in the world of The Descent with a dash of The Blair Witch Project sprinkled in for good measure. Plus, the legendary John Rhys-Davies (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Lord of the Rings) is the professor in the film. The effects looked promising, jump scares were sure to offer some excitement and I was promised a social media influencer would get his head ripped off. All of that in a ninety-seven second trailer? Sign me up!

Written and directed by Howard J. Ford, Bone Keeper enjoyed a positive premiere at Glasgow FrightFest this year. The film tells the story of a mysterious fireball that had crashed to Earth ages ago, only to be stirred awake in the 1970s when a man goes searching through the caves to find out if there’s anything down there. Spoiler alert, there is.

And then some forty-to-fifty years later, a new group of people want to go investigating the cave system. This search team consists of six individuals at the peak of their lives—they’re attractive, athletic, consider themselves to be smart and funny, and have absolutely no fucking clue what they are doing down there.

One of the members of this rag-tag team is the granddaughter of the man who was lost to the caves in 1976. Grandpa may have caught an ancient monster known as the Bone Keeper on film and his granddaughter wants to bring closure to the mystery. Naturally, the group starts being picked off one by one by the titular Eldritch-God-wannabe. It didn’t take long for me to start ranking who I was ready to see get destroyed, devoured or dissected first.

Two highlights early in the film are the meteorite crashing to Earth (impressive use of CGI that doesn’t get too cute) and the set-up of the mythos is decent enough.

Bone Keeper is directly inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos, shapeshifting into a few different images of nightmare fuel while our protagonists are in the caves. It’s an aesthetically pleasing monster that gets the job done, both visually and in dispatching the search team.

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Our wonderful Bone Keeper seems to be the character with the most depth in the movie, and while that’s typically a bad thing, do we really want to waste a lot of screen time on character development during a monster movie like this? You won’t find yourself rooting for anyone other than maybe Professor Harisson (because John Rhys-Davies is cool as hell) so if you’re looking for any of the film’s stars to win you over, it’s best you go into this movie expecting the cardboard characters you’re about to be introduced to.

The characters lack common sense, and our main character, Olivia, seems intent on finding out what happened to lost loved ones by…doing the exact same things they did to get themselves lost in the first place!

The creature is obviously mostly CGI, but the dark tones and shadows of the cave allow for a satisfactory mystery that keeps the viewer from seeing too much at once, thus keeping the groans inspired by bad CGI to a minimum throughout the film.

The movie isn’t perfect, but there’s something endearing about the low-budget vibes it gives off. It’s not pretending to be something that it isn’t—you won’t find a deeper meaning to anything here, nor will you find the strong characters we all fell in love with in The Descent. That’s totally OK, because the filmmaker knows exactly what he made here: “[A] love letter to practical creature horror,” and that is a great summary of what you’re getting during this 90-minute run time.

Bone Keeper is a fun British monster movie with beautiful landscapes, a decent enough story to keep the audience entertained and a thick layer of claustrophobic terror that makes for a worthwhile watch if you’re looking for a Lovecraftian-Lite fix.