Bone Eater (2007)

In my effort to watch movies so you don't have to, I recently rented the festival of Native American stereotypes called Bone Eater.  Hopefully those of you who follow me on Twitter enjoyed reading me life-blogging the viewing.  I plan to do more of that in the future, as the responses I've gotten have been positive, and I had a lot of fun doing it.  Rest assured, I'll only do it for the very worst of movies, those which really can't be spoiled.

Which brings us, of course, to Bone Eater.  I wouldn't have bothered with this one ordinarily, as it isn't in one of my must-see genres like giant reptiles or chupacabras or sasquatches.  But when I saw the cast, I knew I had to watch: Bruce Boxleitner, Gil Gerard, William Katt, Walter Koenig!  There was absolutely no way I could pass that up.  Captain John Sheridan, Captain William Buck Rogers, The Greatest American Hero, and PsiCorps Alfred Bester all in the same place had to be worth seeing, right? Well, yes and no.  Bone Eater is a terrible movie.  It manages to bring together all the old and often offensive cliches and stereotypes about Native Americans and combines them into one big awful whole.  The Big Evil Development Corp is digging on some kind of Native American burial ground, unearthing and hiding artifacts and generally enraging the local tribe.  They dig up an evil creature which runs around killing people until the local sheriff, who happens to be part Native American himself, takes up the appropriate ancient weapon and puts the beastie down. We've all seen that exact plot over and over again, and Bone Eater adds almost nothing new to it.  The acting ranges from horrifically bad (the construction worker first victims in the opening scene) to workman-like.  Boxleitner and Gerard are both very professional.  They've both been acting for years, and don't phone it in despite the terrible movie they find themselves in.  I'd like to say the same for Katt and Koenig, but, to be honest, their cameos were both so short I couldn't really tell.  I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, though.  The plot was pretty moronic and almost seemed to actively avoid any possible character development.  Those characters who should share some dramatic tension spend almost no screen time together exploring it. That said, I did enjoy watching it.  Most of it, of course, was the fun of ridiculing a truly awful movie.  I think it would be even more entertaining to watch it with a group and give it the full MST3K treatment.  The rest was the creature itself.  I don't think I'd seen anything quite that bizarre.  It was supposed to be some ancient skeletal monster, obviously, with a Native American flair.  They accomplished that by first giving it a skeletal headdress, basically a set of bony spines sticking up from it's skull like widely spaced feathers in a war bonnet.  More bizarre was the SKELETAL LOINCLOTH.  Yes, you heard me right, a loincloth made of a set of jointed bony appendages hanging down from its pelvis.  Picture it for a minute.  Look at the image to the left.  Hehe, that's going to haunt your nightmares now.  You can't unsee that. In the end, I have to give this one an easy 0.7 Bolls.  While I don't feel like I completely wasted my time watching it, it will really only appeal to the fans of bad, bad movies.  A group of such friends, lubricated with an appropriate amount of alcohol, might have a good time, but most people would hate it.

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