CREATURE CORNER DVD REVIEW: BONE SICKNESS

The Movie-

Alex
is dying. He’s got some weird sort of degenerative bone sickness, and
it’s left him sick to the point of not being able to act. Excuse me, I
meant take care of himself. His wife Kristen is very concerned for him
and so goes to his good friend Thomas for help.

Thomas (played
by director Brian Paulin) works in a morgue, and has a strange
suggestion for some alternative medicine. He makes some soup out of
human bone marrow and other bits and has Kristen feed them to Alex. But
is he getting better from it? It’s hard to tell, but the blood and
worms coming out of all of his orifices is probably not a good sign.

Wait, what?

I didn’t get it either.

You know how, in every good zombie movie, there’s a scene where the zombies go nuts and chow down on everything living? In Bone Sickness this
happens in every scene with a zombie in it. Which leads me to the two
positive things about the film. First, the zombies are great,
beautifully made- these are on par with the best of the genre. The
makeup work is incredibly done here, and the designs are everything you
could hope for. And to go with that, the gore here is really well done-
even to the point of showing you some things you haven’t seen
before…. wait till you see what happens to a guy who gets stabbed
with his own gun. The main problem with all of the zombie scenes? They
get boring, fast. There’s only so much gore you can watch before you
yawn and wait for the next victim. The actors are nothing to write home
about either (like any of you write home anyway).

The victims
here all act like they’re in a 50s scifi flick, standing completely
still and screaming as monsters approach and tear them apart. They then
make funny faces and die slowly. For a moment I was considering using
screencaps of all their funny faces for this review, but I’m not that
mean. But yeah, there’s not a decent actor among the bunch, which
wouldn’t be such a deal with a gore flick- but this one tries to get
some emotional acting out of them- which just ain’t happening. It just
makes it that much funnier.

Another fault with this movie is
that it doesn’t know when to end. You’d think that the killing off of
most of the main characters (oops, spoiler!) would end the flick, but
no, it goes on for another 30 minutes afterwards with a subplot that
comes out of nowhere involving demons. Really geeky demons. Seriously,
they’re lame. Just look at them. It’s too bad you can’t hear them talk.

But as a whole, the film is just too boring to
merit attention. The first time I watched this flick was with 2
horror-loving friends after we went to a bar and we tuned out about 20
minutes into it. Giving it a second try by myself to see if it was just
that night that turned us off I realized that no, this movie just
doesn’t do it for me. Which is a shame, because there’s some definite
talent involved here. Not the actors, obviously, but the effects are
topnotch for a production with such a low budget. The zombies really
are well made and the gore is just as sick as it should be. (They
actually did go back to reshoot some extra violence to make this more
of an Unearthed flick) But the rest of the movie can’t hold up.

The Sight and Sound-

The
picture’s nothing special. It’s shot on grainy fullscreen DV. The sound
and more specifically the effects are where they dropped the ball on
this. It could’ve been made a lot more brutal with some good sound
effects while the zombies are munching down (See City of Rott for a better example) and when people are getting hacked apart. As it is now everything pretty much falls flat.

This
is where the dvd gets some points. The extras are all very well done,
and there’s a lot of humorous behind the scenes features.

Having Fun on the Set
is exactly that- most of it involving the people dressed up as zombies
goofing around. There’s some really funny stuff here- these obviously
guys had fun making this movie. There’s also more evidence of that in
an Outtakes clip.

An Interview with the Director by
Uncle Creepy of Dread Central (who must be insanely pissed that he was
caught wearing a THC shirt in this… but…) which is good, but makes
the movie appear a lot sicker than it really is.

There’s a Commentary with
director Brian Paulin and actor Rich George, but I didn’t get a chance
to check much of it out. It sounds like they have a good back and forth
but I couldn’t get myself to watch the movie a third time.

Lastly there are Trailers, which are all varied, gory and good. Included are Bone Sickness, Frankenhooker, Ichi the Killer, and the next release- Nails.

Dig
the cover art…. Unearthed definitely takes care with these. The only
thing is that it’s a little dark compared to the image you see above,
but it’s definitely better than most of the art you see out there.

The Lowdown-

Has a lot of potential but never lives up to it. Not really worth your time, when there’s so many better gore flicks out there.