The Bone Snatcher

THE BONE SNATCHER

A 2003 film about a scientist named Zack on an expedition to locate three missing miners in an African desert, The Bone Snatcher features a singular monster in a largely boring (and periodically hard to follow) story.  Zack and his allies (including a potential love interest named Mikki and her ex-boyfriend Karl) locate the miners’ truck and find two bodies that have been mostly stripped of flesh.  Assuming incorrectly that the third miner killed the other two, the heroes follow a set of tracks through the desert.  They ultimately encounter a creature of sorts: a vast army of insects that use bones to take the form of a single large organism.  Zack, Mikki, and Karl deduce that the insects are developing a fresh colony in an abandoned mine and set out to destroy the nest.

The Bone Snatcher features some excellent creepy imagery (at one point the monster wears the face of one victim like a mask), but the story plods along at an uneven pace.  There are a couple of moments when one wonders just why the protagonist takes certain actions, like when he prevents Karl from shooting at the monster.  The tale takes a couple of weird turns.  At one point, Zack and Mikki and Karl spot the creature near their camp at night.  It seems to rush at them, and then suddenly there’s a scene the next morning with everyone alive and well with no trace of the insect-beast around.  Life’s too short to waste ninety minutes on this little movie.